SHANGHAI (Reuters – China’s singles’ day shopping festival must shift its focus from a “traffic- and sales war” mindset to one of technology and science, a state-backed newspaper reported on Friday. It said that China’s “worship of the turnover” was incompatible for China’s current development path.

This article appears in Securities Daily a day following the annual shopping spree spearheaded by Alibaba (NYSE:) Group recorded 540.3 billion yuan of orders during the eleven-day event.

Although the newspaper claimed that this event was responsible for years of record sales, spam text messaging by users and unfair competition led to other practices, such as merchants giving discounts or using SMS messages to trick customers. According to the newspaper, it had been difficult for “breakthrough innovation” in this model.

Platforms and merchants used low prices to sell their products, which is not consistent with China’s goal of high-quality development.

The newspaper stated that the “worshiping of turnover” is unsustainable and inextricably tied to chaos.

The company stated that Singles Day would be a platform for businesses and platforms to display innovative accomplishments and, eventually, even greater pursuits.

I hope that China’s Internet mega-corporations will stop focusing on their business of small-scale businesses and instead focus on building their own rockets to reach space,” said the writer, using examples from Elon Musk (NASDAQ:), founder of Tesla (NASDAQ;) and Jeff Bezos (NASDAQ:).

Alibaba and JD, (NASDAQ:).com didn’t immediately reply to our requests for comment.

Alibaba turned China’s informal Singles’ Day into a shopping event in 2009 and built it into the world’s biggest online sales fest, dwarfing Cyber Monday in the United States.

This year, it has slowed down its marketing efforts amid regulatory scrutiny. It removed the rolling tally that tracked transactions and placed emphasis on sustainability.

Rival JD.com also hosts its Singles Day event but does not release real-time sales data.

($1 = 6.3898 renminbi)