NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — China’s anti–Valentine’s Day has handily surpassed the U.S.’ s Black Friday as the world’s most lucrative online shopping day, and with the company passing $9 billion in sales in 24 hours, it has become one of the most profitable manufactured holidays in history.

Alibaba Group BABA, -1.92% , the largest e-commerce company in China, surpassed $2 billion in sales volume processed through payments app Alipay within the first hour and 11 seconds of Nov. 11. As of Tuesday morning (around 11pm local time in Hangzhou China, where Alibaba is headquartered) sales had surpassed $9 billion, with some 43% generated from mobile, according to Alibaba.

Alibaba CEO Jack Ma said in an interview with CNBC that he was worried about delivering all of the packages on time. The company averages close to 17 million packages a day. Over the next three to five days, it will be responsible for more than 260 million deliveries.

Known as “Singles Day” in China, the holiday was invented by Alibaba in 2009 as a play on a two-decades-old celebration of China’s bachelors. Since then, Alibaba’s Singles Day sales have grown at a meteoric pace, skyrocketing a whopping 5,740% from 2009 to 2013.

Alibaba surpassed both its expectations and those of industry tracker IDC. Alibaba, which heavily promotes Singles Day, had expected to ring up 50 billion yuan, or a record $8.2 billion, for the day. IDC said it was “very likely” Alibaba would reach $8.65 billion, up from $5.75 billion in 2013, $3.04 billion in 2012 and $820 million in 2011. This has made Singles Day one of the most successful — and lucrative — manufactured holidays in history.

As the day neared a close in China, Alibaba said total gross merchandise volume had exceeded 2013 desktop online sales from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday 2013.

Alibaba’s shares are up 73% since pricing at $68 apiece in the company’s record-breaking $25 billion initial public offering in September. They were down 2.8% to $115.72 in recent trade. Late on Monday, Oppenheimer initiated coverage on Alibaba with an outperform rating, according to Benzinga.

Reinventing holidays

Originally called “Bachelors Day,” the holiday was invented in the 1990s as a sort of response to Valentine’s Day. Alibaba took the reins in 2009, encouraging retailers to offer steep discounts in what would eventually morph into a weeks-long shopping event that peaks on Nov. 11.

This concept of reinventing holidays is nothing new. Brands have become dependent on such so-called Hallmark holidays as Valentine’s Day and Sweetest Day that push people to spend.

SunTrust Robinson Humphrey analyst Rob Peck, who reiterated his buy rating on Alibaba on Monday, says he expects 2014’s Singles Day to generate more sales than this year’s entire U.S. Cyber Week, which follows on the heels of the Thanksgiving and Black Friday holiday-shopper kickoff. Last year, U.S. consumers spent $2.9 billion globally online during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, according to ComScore.

Singles Day is a long way from measuring up to the U.S. holiday shopping season in its entirety, which generated sales of more than $48 billion in November and December 2013, according to ComScore. But it is growing at an unprecedented pace.

Partially driving this year-over-year Singles Day growth is the fact that Alibaba’s Tmall.com recently began allowing foreign brands, such as Costco Wholesale COST, -0.33% and Tesla Motors TSLA, -1.86% , to reach Chinese consumers directly through its network.

Ma said Singles Day deals reached consumers in more than 220 countries this year, with global suppliers from more than 20 countries participating and Tmall facilitating transactions from more than 27,000 sellers in total. In an interview with CNBC, he said he expected Singles Day to become a global holiday within the next five years.