Those numbers couldn’t be correct. A month before job losses in the United States surpassed 10 million in two weeks, figures were leaking out of China. In eCommerce and retail, China has served as a leading indicator of sorts, but on February 15th, we couldn’t have imagined the news that would come at the end of the following month. A colleague at Alibaba mentioned that the news would later report a job loss number of catastrophic proportions: six million in the month of February. I didn’t believe it so I disregarded the estimates. I was wrong to do so.
