The date 11th November - Armistice Day - will always have a sombre context in Europe, but, in China 11/11 is ‘singles day’.
Singles Day was initially a retort to Valentines where the romantically unattached treated themselves to a gift. It started in the 90s, but, since 2009 it has been promoted heavily by Alibaba and other online Chinese retailers.
And with the best part of US$10bn of sales already chalked up this year, Singles Day has usurped America’s ‘Black Friday’ as the world’s largest online shopping day.
By midday the Chinese had levelled last year’s record of US$9.3bn worth of transactions.
Albibaba’s Jack Ma this year called on Hollywood with James Bond star Daniel Craig and House of Cards and Usual Suspects actor Kevin Spacey brought into the marketing push.
Spacey appeared as fictional American president Frank Underwood and invited the people of China to buy ‘burner phones’ and M&Ms. Craig, meanwhile, appeared personally on a television launch show for ‘Singles Day’ hosted by Ma.
Away from China, the focus was again on mergers and acquisitions - specifically the much talked about beer ‘mega merger’ between Anheuser-Busch InBev and rival brewer SABMiller (LON:SAB).
Today, the former formally tabled a £71bn bid for the latter, and to appease some anti-trust concerns it separately announced a proposal to sell SABMiller's interest in US and Puerto Rico joint venture MillerCoors to partner Molson Coors for US$12bn.
In London, TalkTalk (LON:TALK) was naturally trending also as the recently hacked telecoms group estimated the breach would cost the company between £30-35mln.
Three people have been arrested over the cyber attack, which saw personal details of 157,000 TalkTalk customers accessed including 15,000 bank account numbers and 28,000 obscured credit and debit card numbers.
Dido Harding, TalkTalk’s chief executive, said the company had contacted all customers directly affected and is writing to all customers outlining how it intends to protect itself from future attacks.