Sports entrepreneurship is a new trend in China

‍‍‍‍As the State Council announced the plan to drive sport industry growth in 2014, there have been increasing investments into the industry. 

Some people have analyzed investments in the industry according to region, industry, the least amount of funds, and the methods of fund raising. 

The result shows that the majority of sports projects are in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong, these three major cities of China, and surrounding areas. 

Guangdong has 14 percent of the projects, Beijing has 14 percent, and Shanghai has 7 percent. Guangdong has the largest amount of investments, 12.3 billion yuan, and ranked No. 1 among all the places. The second and third is Fujian and Beijing respectively. 

These regions can rank at the front is because that the regional economies are relatively more developed, thus people there could accept sports and its economic value more easily. It’s also because that regional policies in these areas often give supports. Take Dongguan city of Guangdong as an example. It plans to build itself as a “sport city”, and so there are many grass roots capitals involved in the sports industry, acting as an important strength in the city’s sports businesses. 

Another feature of the sports projects is that more than half of them are at the starting stage or early stages. And 58 percent of the projects attracted funds by selling shares. 

Among the nearly one thousand projects investigated, traditional projects such as training and education are still the majority, taking about 32 percent. Public exercising business such as fitness clubs are the hot spot for investments. 

As the population of sports and the Internet is somewhat the same group of people, more and more people start to combine sports and the Internet. In all the projects surveyed, 29 percent are related with the Internet, such as sport apps. Some manufacturers of sports equipment start to connect their products with apps. This may be a new direction of development of the industry. 

The sports population is about 680 million in China, but the gross value of sports industry is merely 356.3 billion yuan, only 0.6 percent of China’s GDP. As the sport reform pushes forward, sports entrepreneurship and investments will be a new trend.