More and More People Are Skiing. Is It a Good Business in China Yet?

One thing is certain: it's a sport made for posting on WeChat Moments.

Li Yan started skiing in Xi'an in 2012. Since then he has worked his way through Funiu Mountain in Henan, Beidahu in Jilin and Nanshan outside Beijing. Next he plans to go look at the resorts in Xinjiang.

It began when he saw a friend's ski photos on WeChat Moments. "I saw other people doing it, it looked cool, and I was pretty envious," says Li Yan, who until then had been a skateboarder. When he heard that Xi'an's first ski area, Bailuyuan, had opened nearby, he started going for night sessions after work.

"In 2012 I fell constantly, and so did everyone around me. On the whole hill you might see one person who could actually come down from the top," Li Yan says. "Go this year and it's different. I can get down, and so can everybody else. And there are more and more people there."

His impression is accurate. More and more Chinese people really are heading for the slopes.

The 2016 China Ski Industry White Paper, released in February by a group led by Vanke, counted 15.1 million skier visits in China in 2016, made by 11.33 million people. Twenty years ago, when skiing was first brought into China, fewer than 1,000 people knew how to do it.

Every number attached to the ski business is climbing, too. China now has 646 ski areas, 78 more than in 2015; 226 overhead cable lifts, 198 more than in 2015; and 5,180 snow-making machines, 4,000 more than in 2015.

Who's Looking for an Opening in China?

All of which has set more people staring hard at China.

On February 15, ISPO — the world's largest trade show for sporting goods and sportswear, now in its 47th year — held another spin-off show in Beijing. This time the number of exhibitors from the ice-and-snow sector rose to 70, a fifth of all exhibitors. The slice of the ski supply chain on display has also filled out: not just ski wear and equipment, but runs, cable cars, slope-grooming machinery, snowcats, safety and rescue gear, resort layout, entertainment facilities, ticketing and access-control systems, planning consultancy for ski resorts, and snow-making technology.

Thomas Mur, managing director of the Italian ski-resort company Bolzano Exhibition Co., ran a deliberately "naive" calculation at ISPO's press conference: "In South Tyrol, Italy, 0.5% of people work as ski instructors. If the same were true in China, China would have 7 million instructors, and the training programs that implies would be enormous."

A few lines came up again and again at that press conference: "Since Beijing won the Winter Olympics, public enthusiasm for winter sports has soared." "The winter sports tied to the 2020 Winter Olympics will drive related industry revenue past 300 billion yuan." "By 2025, China's winter sports industry is projected to reach 1 trillion yuan in total size."

The line with the most kick was another one: "The Chinese government hopes to get 300 million Chinese people skiing." Nobody knows whether it's true, but it brings to mind what every foreigner doing business in China says sooner or later: "If everyone gives me one yuan, that's 1.3 billion."

The question is how to get them to hand it over.

How Does Skiing Usually Enter a New Market?

Grand numbers like these may look unrelated to skiers like Li Yan. But in a market with no ski culture, hosting the Winter Olympics is usually what wins the sport a burst of attention in a short time, and the host country loosening policy is usually the direct reason the number of ski areas jumps.

Austria classified skiing as a winter sport back in the late 19th century, and schools there take students skiing on a regular schedule. In countries without a ski culture, the sport almost always arrives with outsiders.

Modern skiing reached Iran in the 1830s largely through the Germans who built the country's national railway in those years, and through young Iranians who studied in Switzerland and France and learned to ski there. Most of Iran's ski areas were built under Shah Pahlavi. After his rule was overthrown in 1979, the clergy closed all of them, on the grounds that "skiing is a pedantic Western way of life."

Bulgaria's ski industry grew for a stretch mainly because the state poured money into mountain resorts and the country kept bidding for the Olympics (many times, never successfully).

Alpine skiing was first carried into Japan by American soldiers during the Second World War, who built the first ski tow in Nagano Prefecture, giving the sport a foothold in the country. But skiing only won a real following in Japan at the 1956 Winter Olympics, when the alpine skier Chiharu Igaya took a silver medal. The 1987 film Take Me Skiing pushed ski spending further and turned the sport into a craze.

In China, the first ski area, built in the 1980s, was designed purely for competition and usually had one run and rough lodging. Only after Yabuli won the right to host the 1996 Asian Winter Games did skiing begin to appear as a mass sport. And Zhangjiakou's successful bid to co-host the 2020 Winter Olympics produced the slogan "300 million Chinese people skiing." Property developers, who find it easy enough to turn a bare mountain into a modern resort, have thrown themselves at the business.

In 2012 Dalian Wanda Group spent 20 billion yuan building the Wanda Changbaishan International Resort. Built on a ski-and-holiday model, it has 43 runs totaling 40,000 meters, plus luxury hotels including a Hyatt, a Sheraton and a Westin.

Vanke merged its two resorts, Songhua Lake and Qiaoshan Beidahu, in 2016 and set up a joint venture, Jilin Wanshan Ski Industry Investment Consulting Co., to run them together — the arrangement common in the Alps and North America. Think of it this way: on one lift ticket you can ski from one valley into the next without ever taking your gear off.

The count keeps rising year by year. Bloomberg, citing figures from the ski-equipment supplier Beijing Kabin Ski Group, reported that China will have more than 1,000 ski areas by 2020.

What Do Skiers Actually Do?

Li Yan has felt this directly.

In 2012 there was one ski area near Xi'an. Type "Xi'an ski resort" into Baidu today and at least 12 come up. For him, more resorts has also meant far less hassle. When Aoshan Ski Resort, in Taibai County, Shaanxi, ran a two-season promotion, he bought passes for the 2016 and 2017 seasons in one go. "I tried it once and I was sunk," he says of his first time on skis.

Jiang Jiehang is hooked in a similar way, only harder.

She first encountered skiing after moving to Japan for a master's in landscape architecture, in a country where the sport is everywhere. Skiing is so easy to get to in Japan, she says, that "it's as ordinary there as playing basketball — there's no high or low to it." Five years ago she treated it as a social activity that "widened the span of life." Then she fell for the sport itself. In her words, "skiing gives me a rush."

Her technique is good enough now that she has left the groomed runs packed down by snowcats and skis powder — the loose, fluffy kind.

The snow that stayed with her is the snow at Japan's Daisetsuzan. "The quality is so good that as you're coming down there's a moment when the whole space around you is wrapped in snow. No gravity, your feet weightless. Snow everywhere, snow in every direction, everything rushing at you at once. For a second it's exactly like diving," she says.

Like her, Ye Shujian, now 43, came to skiing abroad. Twenty years ago, during his first winter as a graduate student in the United States, he started driving out to ski areas with friends, and he kept the habit after moving home. The one change is that having learned on two skis in America, he took up snowboarding in China. He felt his skiing had "no room left to improve, though the clothes you wear on a board are a bit different." "Way too hip-hop," he says.

Ye, who jokes that he is an "elderly snowboarder," says what made him hesitate at the time was that "hardly anyone in China rode a board then, and it's harder to learn from scratch."

Mao Yu, who works at Sony, agrees. He finds a snowboard harder to start on than two skis, and says that later on a board means terrain parks, jumps and halfpipes. "Mostly it's that I'm older — I can't afford the falls," says Mao, who started skiing in 2009.

He still remembers seeing the 230-yuan lift ticket on his first trip and thinking, "That's too expensive, and renting gear costs extra on top." But once he decided to stay with the sport, he began buying equipment piece by piece.

He shops in Ciqikou, the cluster of ski shops in Beijing, though he thinks "they all ask too much." "Something they probably buy wholesale for 2,000 yuan sells for at least 5,000 in Ciqikou. The prices don't make sense," Mao says. He doesn't trust the quality on Taobao either — too easy to end up with a defective item, especially bindings, which hold the boots to the skis. Those you "must never buy on Taobao."

"If a binding has a flaw and you don't do anything big, if you ski slowly, you're fine. But a slight defect and you either fall or lose control. It's dangerous," he says.

The biggest expense in skiing, he thinks, isn't the equipment. It's what you wear.

"On the hill nobody can see what you look like. People find you by your ski suit and your skis. So the suit matters," Mao says. "My wife is exactly like that. She has to have the trendiest thing, something different every year. This season it's all black with a little trim, next season camouflage, the season after that whatever is hot then. She spends more on that than on skis."

But Few People Stay With It

Not everyone is like Mao Yu, Li Yan or Jiang Jiehang, going back to the slopes again and again and paying out of pocket for gear and clothing. Plenty of people go once, for the novelty, and never return.

Liu Yun first skied in November 2015, when she and five coworkers went to the Dolomiti resort in Chongli and stayed two days. Two experienced friends taught her on the beginner run how to control her speed on the way down, how to turn, how to fall and how to get up again. But apart from finding the place beautiful and getting excited at the sight of snow, she did not fall in love with skiing the way she had imagined. She found it "a sport that burns a lot of energy without a single moment to rest."

"The boots were incredibly heavy, the clothes incredibly thick, and the ice so slippery that just walking took real effort. The way down felt great, but I was on the beginner run, so it was over fast — about 15 minutes up and 2 minutes down," she says of her first day. She hasn't been back since.

Even so, she quietly posted four photos on Moments of the friends she went with, in their ski suits at the foot of the mountain.

"If the first time leaves you feeling beaten, a second time is hard. The cost is high, too — you travel that far, it's that cold, and you fall that hard," says Shi Yan, who has skied twice in Chongli this year. In 2013, on a trip home to the Northeast, she stopped at Yabuli and learned. Two trips to resorts near Beijing this year later, she still hasn't bought skis.

By Vanke's count, China logged 15.1 million skier visits in 2016. The same report was blunt about something else: "China is still a fairly rudimentary ski market."

Put plainly, only a small share of those 15.1 million are long-term skiers like Mao Yu and Li Yan. Far more are like Shi Yan and Liu Yun — two or three days at a resort, a few photos, a post on Moments, and never on snow again. This is why Chinese resorts, importing traditional alpine ski curricula from abroad, keep concluding that "the urgent task is to develop a teaching system that fits Chinese conditions."

It is also a big part of why the global ski industry is watching the Chinese market at all, and this kind of one-off spending has acquired a name of its own: "the ski-consumption pattern of countries like China."

Laurent Vanat, who writes the International Report on Snow & Mountain Tourism every year, assessed the Chinese market in his 2016 report with a touch of feeling: "China has no ski culture; 80% are beginners. One-time skiers make up a very high share of total skier visits. When skiers fall, resort staff help them up and fetch their gear for them! Unfortunately, Chinese ski areas are usually very crowded and full of out-of-control beginners, which makes for less than ideal conditions for a first time on snow."

That is the contradiction in this market. The sudden rush of people trying skiing out of curiosity has clearly been good for resort business, but because most of them are beginners, they all pile onto the beginner runs.

One direct cause is that the supporting facilities at Chinese ski areas aren't very good. Vanat's 2016 report counted 568 ski resorts in China, using the standard "five or more uphill lift installations." In other words, not every place you can ski counts as a "ski resort"; it depends on the lifts.

By international convention, a place needs overhead cable lifts to be called a ski resort. If all it has is a "magic carpet" conveyor to move skiers uphill, it is a "snow-play park." Of the 646 ski areas counted in Vanke's white paper, only 226 have overhead cable lifts, and since some large resorts have three or more of them each, the number of proper ski resorts with overhead lifts is really only a bit over 200. The rest meet the standard of a snow-play park.

"It was November, only a few weeks into the season, but the magic carpets and tow-lift entrances that take beginners up the hill were jammed. It was packed from eight in the morning, and every line took at least ten-odd minutes," Liu Yun recalls.

Genting Ski Resort once ran a promotion at the end of a season with discounts steep enough to pull in a crowd, and someone wrote a post online titled "Heard You Joined Genting's Ten-Thousand-Li Queuing Marathon Last Weekend?" to complain about how many people were there.

"Because one-off spending exists, some resorts have started treating themselves as a tourist attraction," Wu Bin, chief strategy officer of Vanke Group's Ice and Snow Business Unit, told QDaily. "If you decide your customers are one-off customers, then you serve one-off customers. You don't pay attention to the future market, you don't invest in the experience. That damages the whole industry."

Whether resorts can hold on to customers like Liu Yun is the question Wu Bin keeps returning to. Pulling people like her back onto the snow and turning them into holiday customers is, he believes, the key to changing how China spends on skiing.

"Whether this is a bubble can't be judged yet. If we can convert them, it isn't a bubble. If we can't, in the end it is one," Wu says. "Because this is an unstable group of people. There's no continuity to it. They try it once, they won't spend again, and it won't turn into a habit of holiday spending either."

Beyond that, Wu thinks the thing "the future market absolutely has to do" is get young people onto rinks and slopes, because they "radiate outward." Vanke has built indoor and outdoor children's ski zones at the resorts it runs, staffed them with instructors and coaches who teach children, and set up winter camps for young customers.

Predictably, the government still wants to be the main engine here. Harbin, Beijing and Hohhot have all launched "Million Youths on Ice and Snow" campaigns. In February, Sun Xuecai, director of the Beijing Municipal Sports Bureau, told People's Daily Online that the city plans to designate 100 ice-and-snow specialty schools by 2022 and to build after-school ice-and-snow centers for young people in districts and counties that qualify.

"Ten years ago, if a ski area wanted to contact a school to organize a winter camp, it would have been hard to arrange even for free. Now the government is driving it, and the market is changing too," Wu says.

Skiers Dive in the Summer

Today's ski enthusiasts aren't all that faithful to the sport either. Once they have time and spare money, skiing isn't the only thing they want to do; more and more are also trying hiking, water sports, camping, off-roading and rock climbing.

Da Xiong (a pseudonym), who lives in Chengde, has been snowboarding for years. In 2015 he founded a club, the White Hunter Snowboard Club. Its 130 members aren't devoted to skiing alone. "Even out of season, some of the group switch to running and climbing, some skateboard, some go diving or take on the desert," he says.

Li Tao, a student counselor at Chongqing University's School of Journalism and Communication, has skiing as her next goal. In August 2016 she spent half a month in Malaysia, and after paying 2,800 Malaysian ringgit for her Advanced Open Water diving certificate, she found herself drawn to skiing. It was, she says, the photos of skiing in Japan that her diving instructor posted on Moments.

Like others who want to learn, she has another reason: "ski photos look good." Next summer she'll try another extreme sport. Maybe skiing, maybe surfing.

(At the interviewees' request, Jiang Jiehang, Liu Yun, Mao Yu, Li Tao and Shi Yan are pseudonyms.)

Cover and in-text images from: ski-thea.com and s1.bwallpapers.com.