【Industry Trends】China Sports Industry Development Report 2013Released

　　Social Sciences Academic Press of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in a joint with Capital Institute of Physical Education, released China Sports Industry Development Report 2013on 2nd April.

　　Mr. ZhongBingshu, president of Capital Institute of Physical Education, said as the chief editor and keynote speaker: based on substantial data and cases, the report presented a comprehensive analysis of high performance, fitness, sporting goods and facilities, the only one sports blue paper in China having instructive significance to sports industry. It should focus on sports to address problem in sports industry, and sports needed support from industry in return.

　　Mr. ZhongBingshu also talked about land for sports in urbanization progress, professional sports, student fitness in his speech. Representatives from media, such as Li Zhongwen, director of sports department of People’s Daily, as well as Zhang Lenian, routine deputy editor in chief of China Sports Daily, Yan Qiang, deputy editor in chief of Netease, commented on the sports blue paper and joined the discussion on hot topics.

　　Enjoying sports was right, not privilege, ensuring the realization of China dream

　　After all, China dream belonged to the whole Chinese. Li Zhongwen suggested that it meant common people had right to enjoy sports. He cited some words from honorary president of IOC Samaranch: sport was right, not privilege, people all over the word should own this right. It asked to reserve sports land in urbanization progress, enriching spare time and improving citizen fitness through sports.

　　Enhancing youth fitness, policies hadn’t reached it.

　　The State Council launched 《Suggestions On Enhancing Youth Sports And Fitness》in 2007, seeing youth fitness enhance as essential education objective. And the Central documents clearly indicated that students should exercise one hour every day and PE was compulsory. At the end of 2012, the State Council transmitted the document from Education Department, appealing pay attention to school sports and one hour exercise daily, and making specific requests for PE among pupil, middle and college students. ZhongBingshu said, the government cared about it but the policies couldn’t be put into practice. He shared some date: average children outdoor time was 3.41 hour in the world, but it was just 0.86 hour in China. Only 24.3% Beijing students met the recommendations of one hour exercise in 2010, and 7/10 Shanghai students failed.

　　As to student fitness, Zhang Lenian considered professional sports as inspiration to youth exercise. Marbury basketball training camp, launched by Capital Institute of Physical Education and Stephon Marbury, set up links between professional sports and school sports with the band effect of Beijing men’s basketball and the former NBA superstar to serve students better.

　　Discover value from professional sports

　　As English football expert, Yan Qiang thought professional sports were different from high performance and sport for all, which could meet mental needs and provide high value. While professional sports were still immature in China, more needed to be done to discover its value.

　　Sporting goods industry was big but not strong

　　There were 3 characteristics of China sporting goods industry summarized by the report: 1. the whole industry was big but not strong. Added value of each production segment on the industrial value chain was low, labor cost and marketing channels contributed to the profit, and the industrial structure needed to be optimized. 2. As economic level and labor cost in China growing up and business environment getting worse, sporting goods industry competed fiercely, facing distribution channel cost increasing as well as the impact from international economic environment, such as price increase of raw material, appreciation of the RMB, pressure of export and others. 3. The whole industry featured high density and unbalanced region development, which was a double-edged sword to the region development.

　　Sports equipment industry developed rapidly, with substantial sales and price advantage, but few famous domestic brands required the high end sports equipment market to improve. In addition, international brands still occupied the high end market of sports apparel, and the rest controlled by domestics.

　　Chinese sports brands competitiveness needed to be improved. “When it came to brand maintenance and promotion even poor quality products, brands were weak at dealing with public relations in crisis and lacked of experts to improve brands competitiveness. Especially in the course of choosing the platform of brands promotion, brands were influenced by partial market benefit and showed their short sight; unclear brand positioning reflected on changing products.”

　　“Beyond that, sporting goods businesses featured intensive labor and the labor price trended to increase, however the local government wanted to keep the big sporting goods enterprises by varied resources and policies to earn plenty of tax in a short time, which harmed both enterprises and governments finally.”

　　Governments and corporations couldn’t resolve the problem of increasing labor cost, while there was no good industrial chain arrangement in sporting goods industry. Business intensive region in city benefited sales; however corporation intensive region resulted in competition for some resources. Then the recourses were over developed, and labor price grew, while the industrial structure in city was unreasonable.

　　For these reasons, the report suggested that the sporting goods corporations should live on the basis of their own rules and arranged nationally. For instance, they could put the creation in fashion city, brand marketing in city with developed media, production in city with convenient transportation and reasonable labor price, and became big and strong enterprises.