An anti-Valentine’s Day celebration adopted by online retailer Alibaba to boost sales is expected to see record-breaking results for the Chinese company after it sold $2 billion (£1.2 billion) of goods in the first hour alone.  

The country’s annual Singles Day began in 1993 when students created a day for single people to buy things for themselves and was adopted by Alibaba in 2009. It has since become a key date for China’s ecommerce market, which is expected to grow at an annual rate of 25% over the next few years,

Last year, the event saw the company ship over 150 million packages, worth approximately $5.75 billion.

"I bet the number [of goods bought] is going to be scary," said Alibaba's executive chairman Jack Ma last week. He estimated that 200 million packages would be shipped from orders made during the day.