Singles’ Day highlights Chinese sports tycoons

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Thanks to continuous hype building of e-business magnates in China, Singles’ Day has become a global shopping festival, with sales in Alibaba's sites Tmall and Taobao at over US$14.3 billion in 2015. Especially, the participation of sports companies including Le Sports, Alibaba Sports and PPTV added more fresh energy to the spree this year, which in return changes the sports industry in China:

Removed barriers in sports

As if by prior agreement, e-commerce tycoons like Alibaba and Suning begin to unfold their layouts in the emerging sports industry. Founded in March, 2014,  Le Sports or LeTV Sports attracted investment from both Jack Ma, Alibaba’s CEO and Jianlin Wang, Wanda’s CEO. Another sports media, Suning-backed PPTV has kept exclusive broadcasting rights to CSL, CBA, NFL, and Europe's top five leagues. Not to be outdone, Alibaba Sports Group was set up to integrate e-commerce, media, marketing, video, home entertainment and cloud computing among other internet-enabled technologies in September this year.

Highlights of e-commerce sports

Le Sports launched its smart production Super Bicycle in August, in addition to popular self-made sports programs and a wide-ranging broadcast rights to all Asian Football Confederation (AFC) events across all platforms in China from 2017 to 2020. Under the advertising slogan “I am not only a bicycle, but an ecosystem of movable traffic internet”, 1111 bicycles were sold out through Lemall.com within 8 minutes on Singles’ Day, according to LeTV’s official website. 

As a leading video website in China, PPTV has great potential to create a business mode of hardware, content, service, and e-commerce that would advance its brand influence and sponsored clubs’ marketing value, considering PPTV’s covering 200 million sports viewers and its parent company Suning’s profound online-to-offline basis. By utilizing rich resources, PPTV and Suning launched three smart TV sets with top-quality hardware, followed by the news of five-year exclusive broadcast rights to La Liga seven days later. This is not coincidence, of course, because linking television with sports is their core.

Different from the above companies, Alibaba Sports focuses on its renowned e-commorce platform strategy. Zhang Dazhong, Alibaba Sports Group CEO, said at 2015 Shanghai Sports Show on November 8 that they would make an influential Chinese sports platform. For example, recently Alibaba’s shopping website Taobao has highlighted the NCAA events information and provided an easy entry for buying the tickets.

A best and worst age

In conclusion, the Singles’ Day witnessed joys and worries of sports enterprises in China. Sports industry is in its best times because of friendly policy supports and circumstances while it’s also in its worst age in that competition would become even much fiercer when industry barriers are removed by capitals from different industries.

Source: Chinadaily

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