Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is open to working with eBay Inc.’s PayPal to expand payment options after shoppers bought a record 57.1 billion yuan ($9.3 billion) of goods during the Chinese company’s annual Singles’ Day promotion.

Asia’s largest Internet company also sees Apple Inc.’s payment system as helping Chinese consumers when Alibaba’s finance affiliate Alipay isn’t accepted, Vice Chairman Joseph Tsai said in an interview Tuesday in Hangzhou, China. Alibaba said earlier that it beat last year’s record of 36.2 billion yuan for the Nov. 11 promotion within 14 hours.

Less than two months after completing the biggest initial public offering ever, China’s largest e-commerce operator is setting its sights on global expansion as it seeks to attract international merchants and consumers for its platforms. Its financial affiliate is the biggest payments processor in China and also has 17.9 million active users overseas in more than 100 countries.

“If you look at our footprint of being the largest online payment company in China, and PayPal’s position of having a very good international position, not just in the U.S. but also in some other countries, these are some complementary footprints,” Tsai said Tuesday in Hangzhou, China. 

eBay is splitting off PayPal to create two independent companies in 2015. The split may value PayPal at $47 billion, applying a multiple of 1.8 times trailing 12-month revenue ― similar to Amazon.com Inc.’s ― to eBay’s marketplaces and advertising businesses, Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Praveen Menon and Paul Sweeney said last month.

Alibaba’s financial affiliate Zhejiang Ant Small & Micro Financial Services Group Co. is the owner of Alipay and controlled by founder Jack Ma. Ant Financial is targeting an initial public offering in China, Tsai said.

“Going public is way to help the company do better work,” Tsai said. “We hope in the future the Chinese stock market will have the kind of liquidity and scale that can welcome a company like Ant Financial.”

Merchandise sold Tuesday by Alibaba’s platforms is more than the $5.29 billion of U.S. online sales from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday in 2013, the company said. The company using 27,000 labels to attract shoppers, including Calvin Klein, Costco Wholesale Corp. and American Eagle Outfitters Inc.

Alibaba fell 3.9 percent to close at $114.54 at in New York trading Tuesday, the biggest decline since Sept. 22.

Alibaba’s “share price went up a lot in anticipation the Nov. 11 day sales would be good,” said Jeff Papp, a senior analyst at Lisle, Illinois-based Oberweis Asset Management Inc., which oversees $1.5 billion. “People buy on the expectation and they sell when the actual result comes out.”

For this quarter, the question is what these numbers mean for the company’s margins, Papp said by phone.

Singles’ Day, a Chinese twist on Valentine’s Day, was invented by students in the 1990s, according to the Communist Party-owned People’s Daily. When written numerically, the date is reminiscent of “bare branches,” the Chinese expression for bachelors and spinsters. (Bloomberg)