Auction, a leading online marketplace in South Korea, said Monday that sales of girls' toys have risen sharply the past week, outperforming those for boys' items, on surging demand ahead of the Children's Day holiday.

Children's Day, which falls on May 5, is a public holiday in South Korea. Toy sales tend to surge around this time every year as parents and relatives rush to buy a present for their children in their families.  

The sales of dolls, including rag dolls and animation character dolls, soared twofold in the  April 12-18 period from a year earlier, while those for boys like robots dropped 7 percent in the same period, according to company data.

The sales of ball-jointed dolls, predominantly led by Barbies and other similar lineups, skyrocketed by more than 14-fold this year from 2016, with those of baby dolls made to resemble a real human baby that cry, laugh, coo and gurgle for toddlers to play mommy with jumped fivefold, the online shopping site run by eBay Korea Co. said.

In contrast, shipments of riding toys backtracked 2 percent on-year, with those of mobile toys like trains and remote-control vehicles sliding 4 percent.

"Animation characters popular among girls have emerged as a new trend that has propelled the sales, a transition from how we'd seen tremendous popularity in boys' toys such as Power Rangers and Turning Mecards in the past couple of years," Choi Woo-seok, an Auction official from the kids items division, said.

Nevertheless, toy blocks, such as those by Lego, continued to fly off the shelves with their sales almost doubling from last year, Auction said, citing their popularity regardless of gender.

Auction has been offering top-listed children's toys at discounts of up to 70 percent as part of this year's Children's Day special promotion, it added. (Yonhap)