(Yicai Global) Nov. 1 -- This year, Double-Eleven will unveil online and offline retail "smart stores" and it is no longer just an online shopping festival, and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. [NYSE:BABA] feels no competitive pressure from Tencent Holdings Ltd. [HK:0700] and JD.com Inc. [NASDAQ:JD], Tmall, an online retail marketplace that Alibaba operates, said at its 2017 Tmall Double 11 Global Shopping Festival press briefing in Shanghai yesterday.

"Double-Eleven has become a global synergy of all the commercial forces in the world driven by science, technology and big data," Alibaba Chief Executive Daniel Zhang said at the press conference. 

This year's Double-Eleven offers a panorama of Alibaba's economic ecosystem, from physical and digital goods to entertainment and the interaction of offline and online stores, from cities to the countryside, and from domestic to overseas, and the company hope that this showcase can demonstrate the commercial forces and partners of Alibaba's ecological chain to the world on this day, said Zhang.

Faced with the concept of "unlimited retail" that Tencent and JD.com introduced, Alibaba feels no pressure from the competition, Alibaba Chief Marketing Officer Dong Benhong said.

The Double-Eleven e-commerce festival that falls on November 11 (11/11) is also known as Singles' Day. It started as a counter-Valentine's Day male students at Nanjing University pioneered in the 1990s to protest and resist societal pressure to marry. They may have taken their inspiration from the four single digits in the date, which is the prevailing, if erroneous view as to the origin of the term. The celebration has since evolved into China's Black Friday.