A Chinese logistics firm majority-owned by Alibaba has opened a warehouse with over 700 robots working in it to deal with the demand from Singles Day, the huge annual shopping festival run by the e-commerce giant. The company, Cainiao, on Tuesday unveiled what it would be doing to support the shopping festival, which takes place on Nov. 11 and last year raked in over $25 billion in sales. The logistics firm runs warehouses and works with delivery companies to get packages to customers. It says it uses technology to make the process more efficient and its publicly stated goal is to eventually deliver to anyone in China within 24 hours and internationally in 72 hours. Automation in its warehouses has become a huge focus for Cainiao, which is 51 percent owned by Alibaba.

On Friday, the company officially opened a warehouse in Wuxi, a city in the east of China, which employs 700 so-called automated guided vehicles. Those are robots that can automatically pick up a parcel and deliver them to another part of the warehouse where it is then picked up by a delivery firm. Cainiao says that process has brought significant time savings. Ben Wang, vice president of Cainiao, told CNBC that the Wuxi facility is the "largest automated warehouse in China," adding that the company is focusing on automating more processes. Last year on Singles Day — also known as the Double 11 shopping festival — Cainiao processed over 800 million packages. This year it is expecting over a billion, Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang said earlier this month during an event in Beijing.