With an opening concert from pop star Katy Perry and an appearance by former basketball player Kobe Bryant, China’s Singles Day sale — Alibaba’s annual orgy of consumption — kicks off this week with more glitz and money than ever before.

The 24-hour sale, which takes place on November 11 (more graphically, 11.11) was not invented by Alibaba but the ecommerce group has made it a fixture of the retail calendar. Now the company plans to use the brouhaha around the event to launch itself beyond mainland China.

As a China-only event, Singles Day has already blown America’s Black Friday out of the water. Alibaba turned over $14.3bn on November 11 last year, compared to the $11.1bn spent online in the US over the whole five-day period from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, which includes Black Friday when retailers kick off the holiday season with big discounts.

The company is exploiting a trove of big data gathered through its retail, streaming and payment platforms in China, and this year it is launching a pilot programme targeting Singles Day shoppers in Hong Kong and Taiwan for the first time. Next year it plans to target Southeast Asia.

It is also expanding via mergers and acquisitions, such as its stakes in Southeast Asian ecommerce group Lazada.

But internationalisation is a tough ask for Alibaba, say analysts, as it is for peers Baidu and Tencent. China’s tech trinity, collectively known as BAT, have grown rapidly at home, unshackled by international competition, but have taken little more than baby steps abroad. The reverse, analysts add, is also true: Amazon has failed to make much headway in China.

“There’s a tremendous challenge to take it global,” says Scott Likens, who heads PwC’s analytics and emerging technologies business in Hong Kong. “The model that works in China does not work outside China, or at least not as well.”

Jack Ma, the one-time English teacher who founded Alibaba, has set a target of 2bn consumers in the next decade. In other words, come 2026, he expects roughly one in four people in the world to shop through Alibaba’s ecommerce platforms including Taobao and Tmall.

These global ambitions are typically immodest. Mr Ma describes his plans for a “World e-Trade Platform” as a sort of World Trade Organisation without disputes, helping “the 80 per cent of companies and developing countries that cannot participate in world trade” to sell overseas.

His claims to be overturning the concept of ecommerce are equally bold. Alibaba is becoming a “consumer-to-business” company, rewriting the retail rule book, it says, so that shoppers, through big data, tell retailers what they want to buy.

“We will become the future of new retail,” says Daniel Zhang, Alibaba chief executive. “Product design and manufacturing will move in the direction of truly being driven by big data.”

In essence, this means Alibaba using past shopping and browsing habits to anticipate what consumers are interested in and to curate pages accordingly.

Alibaba’s interests give it a much bigger trove of data on customers than that collected by international rivals such as Amazon. A Chinese consumer can (and does) spend a sizeable chunk of time in Alibaba’s web. Its 450m monthly mobile users spend an average 20 minutes per day on a personalised Taobao app, streaming service Youku Tudou has 580m subscribers, and Alibaba part-owns the payments platform Ant Financial.

“As a digital company they collect your behaviour,” says Steven Lu of Bain & Co’s technology practice in Shanghai. “And they’ve started to monetise that through the core business.”

Providing more data to merchants means Alibaba can charge higher commissions, which on Tmall typically range from 0.4 to 5 per cent.

Typical ecommerce models are predicated on there being a physical product on a shelf with a price sticker attached, says PwC’s Mr Likens: customers select from the products on offer and pay the set price.

“But in the new world of BAT that doesn’t need to be the case,” he says. “The infrastructure is there, the data are there, the analytics are there. It’s just a matter of pulling them together. So pricing could be dynamic, as we have seen in other industries such as airlines and hotels.”

Data also help with logistics and inventory planning, adds Mr Lu. For example, shoppers can put their selected items in virtual carts ahead of Singles Day to assure delivery.

By analysing how many times shoppers refresh their carts and refill them, Alibaba can measure the likelihood of purchase. That data can helping merchants estimate how much inventory they need and where.

That in turn can help make logistics more efficient and, for merchants, reduce the time that capital is tied up, Mr Lu says.

While shoppers race to snap up bargains, merchants and industry players will be parsing the numbers to see if Alibaba can pull off a seventh year of turbocharged growth.

“They’ve crushed every record every year, so how long can they sustain that?” asks Mr Likens. However, “the story has been good so far so I would not bet against them”.