On the evening of February 20, the 16-day Winter Olympic Games in Beijing was successfully concluded, leaving behind the shock of home and abroad.
According to the "2021 China Ice and Snow Industry Development Research Report", from 2015 to 2020, the total scale of the mainland ice and snow industry will increase from 270 billion yuan to 600 billion yuan. In the case of the Winter Olympics to drive the enthusiasm of the whole people for ice and snow sports, Pan Helin, executive dean of the Digital Economy Research Institute of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, predicted that by 2025, there will be a scale of 1 trillion yuan.
Nowadays, in the process of running to trillions, this industry is undergoing a major turning point. This turning point is not known to many people so far.
For most people, ice and snow are a thing of the north, and this Winter Olympics confirmed this. The good performance of the Chinese team in this tournament can be called a big victory for the northerners.
Among the Chinese Winter Olympic delegation, 100 of the 176 athletes are from the northeast, and the rest, except for the naturalized team members, are mostly from Xinjiang, Beijing, Tianjin, Gansu and so on.
Chinese athletes achieved all-time bests in 9 gold, 4 silver and 2 bronze, while of the 12 athletes who won 9 gold medals (including team events), 10 were from the northeast, 1 was from Xuzhou, a northern city in the south, and 1 was naturalized Gu Ailing. At least from the proportion of this Olympic team, among the participants in China's ice and snow sports, northerners are the absolute main force.
Intuitively, this is a normal thing.
The coal industry must first have coal, the steel industry must first have iron, ice and snow sports, and first of all, there must be ice and snow. From Nanling to the north, china basically the more ice and snow in the north, the more ice and snow activity venues are easily accessible. This is indeed the case.
According to the "2020 Ski Industry White Paper", the mainland ski resorts currently present a pattern of more north and less south, and the ski infrastructure in the north where snowfalls all year round is also more perfect.
In 2020, the total number of normal ski resorts in China is 715, ranking first in Heilongjiang Province, which has the highest latitude, with a total of 94 ski resorts, Xinjiang and Hebei rank second with 65 ski resorts, and the follow-up Shandong, Shanxi, Henan, Jilin, Inner Mongolia, Liaoning, Shaanxi and so on are all northern regions.
Similar patterns are observed in terms of the number of skiers. In the 2020/2021 snow season, the number of people participating in skiing nationwide was 10.86 million, a decrease of nearly 20% compared with before the epidemic, but Hebei, Jilin and Beijing still ranked in the top three with 2.21 million, 2.02 million and 1.88 million skiers, accounting for nearly half.
Among the top 10 provinces in terms of skiers, only Sichuan and Zhejiang are the two southern provinces
At the same time, according to the data released by the top mobile social platform "Ski" in the ski field, 60% of its users are concentrated in beijing, Jilin, Hebei and Heilongjiang. The top 10 ski resorts with the most recorded track mileage, such as Wanlong Holiday Paradise, Songhua Lake Resort, Secret Garden Genting Park, etc., 4 are located in Zhangjiakou, Hebei, 3 in Jilin, 2 in Xinjiang, and 1 in Harbin.
According to the background research data of an investment institution on Tweak, the penetration rate of Tlide App in the ski enthusiast group has reached 82.4%. The above data should be regarded as a relatively comprehensive reflection of the distribution of the ski enthusiast group, which is generally concentrated in the northern region.
The search for genius is a positive correlation between the probability of fighting for probability, the mass base involved in ice and snow sports, and the probability of good seedlings appearing. There are many top seedlings as a reserve, selected from them, and then professional training, which is why the northern players of the Chinese delegation shined in this Winter Olympic Games.
However, the development of the industry is complex and will not remain static. Industries like soccer, which were originally "poor" sports, develop to a certain scale and evolve into a certain economic threshold.
As for skiing, which itself belongs to the "aristocracy", at the moment of 600 billion industrial scale, a simple sentence "the natural conditions in the north are superior, and the mass foundation is solid", which is not enough to include the prospect of its "trillion" scale.
First of all, it must be clear that the ski industry on the mainland is still in a fairly young stage. Since it is immature, it is not possible to simply form stereotypes according to the status quo and preconceived notions, otherwise it can only miss the opportunity.
A sports industry is not developed, participants are an important indicator, and participants can be roughly divided into 2 kinds - whim to try the "play ticket" experience crowd; And put it into it as a hobby, with regular fixed consumption habits for core participants.
There is no doubt that the latter is the backbone of industrial development. Without core players, an industry cannot be said to have developed.
Although Chinese football once had a large amount of capital injection, a large number of people watching the top league, the surrounding industries developed, and the face looked bright, the fatal problem of few kickers and insufficient "football population" determined the immature inside the mainland football industry.
The same is true of skiing until now.
As mentioned above, there are currently more than 700 ski resorts in operation in China, and tens of millions of people join the sport every year, but the vast majority of them are not core players.
According to the core target customer group, the White Paper divides the mainland ski resorts into three categories: tourism experience, suburban learning and destination vacation.
Among them, the suburban learning type is aimed at local customers with skiing needs, with an average stay time of 3-4 hours, and the destination vacation type is for vacation customers with a stay of more than 1 day. Of these two types of ski resorts, the target customers of the former are undoubtedly the core participants mentioned above, and the latter is between the core participants and the "ticket play" people.
However, whether it is a suburban learning type or a destination resort type, it only accounts for a small part of the ski resorts – the former accounts for 22%, the latter accounts for 3%, and the remaining 75% are all tourist experience ski resorts.
Tourist experience ski resorts are aimed at the "play ticket" crowd. This kind of venue, generally in the scenic area or on the outskirts of the city, has simple facilities, and the ski slopes are only beginners. More than 90% of its user groups are one-time experience customers, the average stay time is only 2 hours, about a few butt piers, just able to stand firmly and slide down to go, will not come back later.
This part of the group is now the main participant in the "ice and snow fever" in the north, but it will certainly not be the pillar force of China's trillion ice and snow industry in the future, and the hot south will reflexively rise and become the biggest driving force for the development of the ice and snow industry.
The reason is simple, it boils down to 2 words - economy.
In the embryonic stage, an industry may first be born in areas rich in natural endowments, but after taking shape, it will still conform to economic laws and concentrate in developed areas. High-threshold sports such as skiing, especially those that require economic standards, can find precedents in the world.
According to international experience, when a country's per capita GDP reaches the level of $5,000, the demand for sports in the country begins to rise;
When the per capita GDP reaches 8,000 US dollars, the sports industry will gradually grow into one of the pillar industries of the national economy;
It is not until the per capita GDP moves to $10,000 that the form of mass sports will shift from relatively simple and relatively low-cost outings, mountaineering, hiking, running, etc., to more complex and relatively high-cost cycling, skiing, diving, surfing, etc.
In 2019, the overall per capita GDP of the mainland exceeded the mark of $10,000, but the geographical gap still exists.
According to the statistics of the Population of Qipu in 2020, the provinces with a per capita GDP of more than 10,000 US dollars are Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Fujian, Tianjin, Zhejiang, Guangdong, Chongqing, Hubei, Inner Mongolia and Shandong, of which 7 are southern provinces and 4 are northern provinces.
If you look at the city, the gap is more obvious. The top 10 cities with per capita GDP in China in 2020 are Wuxi, Beijing, Nanjing, Suzhou, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Changzhou, Zhuhai, Hangzhou, and Guangzhou (excluding resource-based cities) – only Beijing is one northern city.
The advantages of the southern region are significant.
From the perspective of the real scene, it is felt that the ice and snow industry should rely on the view of the north, which is nothing more than the view that the north is the "origin" of ice and snow, and the cost of participation is low. However, this view of the perception of ice and snow sports is actually still stuck to the degree of "moving on the ice surface" in the past, and there is a lack of understanding of the core participants of real ice and snow sports.
In fact, the threshold of modern ice and snow sports is not how to "get snow", but whether it can afford the cost of equipment, training and so on.
According to the Southern Metropolis Daily, if you want to seriously learn skiing, it takes tens of thousands of yuan to purchase a complete set of medium skiing equipment. Even adults, under long-term use, the life of ski equipment can only be maintained for 2 or 3 years, not to mention the rapid growth of child skiers, frequent replacement of equipment is a sky-high expense.
In terms of training courses, the average price of one-on-one ski personal training classes in a ski experience store in Hangzhou is about 400-600 yuan per lesson. According to the frequency of 2 lessons per week, the cost of 1 year is more than 60,000 yuan.
For people in economically relatively backward areas, although the venue is close, equipment and training have become a heavy burden, and only in developed areas can more people afford the corresponding costs.
This trend is already emerging. According to data released by Decathlon, for six consecutive years, the cities with the highest sales of its ski brand Wed'ze are Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu.
According to Ctrip's group tour and independent travel data, from November 2018 to April 2019, the top 20 source cities for ice and snow tourism were Shanghai, Guangzhou, Beijing, Shenzhen, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Wuhan, Nanchang, Guiyang, Xiamen, Changsha, Hefei, Chongqing, Xi'an, Nanning, Chengdu, Tianjin, Jinan, Zhengzhou and Xining. Snow tourism is particularly attractive to southern tourists, and going to the north every winter to watch snow has become a trend in recent years.
In the per capita consumption of ice and snow tourism, the consumption of tourist groups in southern cities is generally higher than that of northern people, of which Guilin tops the list with a per capita consumption of 7069 yuan, and the single per capita consumption of the top 20 cities reaches 3827 yuan. Since ice and snow destinations are mainly concentrated in the north, the cost of transportation makes the tourism cost of tourists in southern cities higher.
At the same time, the "ice and snow fever" in the south has been manifested through the popularity of indoor ski resorts.
The "White Paper" clearly mentions that the increase brought about by the operation of indoor ski resorts has a greater impact on the growth of ski trips, especially large and medium-sized indoor ski resorts in southern cities. The report mentions that in the 2020-2021 snow season, there are 36 indoor ski resorts in China, the number of which is the first in the world.
Although the number of venues is much lower than the more than 700 outdoor ski resorts, the number of skiers in indoor ski resorts reached a staggering 3.21 million, accounting for 5% of the venues, obtaining 15.46% of all 20.76 million ski trips in the 2020-2021 snow season.
The reason for this achievement is that in addition to catering to the increasingly strong demand for ice and snow in the south, the indoor ski resort also overcomes the operational problem of the outdoor ski resort - four seasons operation.
A large snow field from the development and construction to the cable car and other hardware equipment, as well as artificial snowmaking, personnel costs, service facilities, etc., are evenly shared to the annual cost of several hundred million, and the real operation cycle of the snow field is only the winter season.
On the mainland, due to the influence of the climate difference between the north and the south, the golden operation period of the snow field is about 3-5 months, starting from November of each year and latest to February and March of the following year. Most of the ski resorts announce the end of the snow season in April, and very few ski resorts like Wanlong can operate until around May Day.
Although many domestic ski resorts are exploring the four-season operation model, adding mountain bike downhill, hiking, cross-country running, music festivals, all-terrain off-road vehicles and other projects, but due to economic reasons, there are few participants, and non-snow season revenue accounts for more than 40% of the annual ski resorts are already rare.
Some people may ask, the north also built an indoor ski resort, is it okay? Yes, it must be taken into account that the cost of building an indoor ski resort is very high.
In 2019, Sunac China signed an investment cooperation agreement with Bao'an District of Shenzhen to build Sunac China Greater Bay Area Headquarters and Ice and Snow Culture and Tourism Complex Project in Bao'an District. Among them, the ice and snow cultural tourism complex project plans to invest about 33.83 billion yuan. Of course, this is not the cost of building a ski resort alone, how much does it cost alone?
According to comprehensive third-party reports, Guangzhou Sunac Snow World, which covers an area of 75,000 square meters, has a construction cost of 1.5 billion yuan, and the world's largest indoor ski resort and 80,000 square meters of Harbin Sunac Entertainment Snow Park has a construction cost of 2.2 billion yuan. This is just the beginning, after the completion, in order to maintain a stable ice and snow environment, a lot of money will be invested in the future.
Guangzhou Sunac indoor ski resort, the perennial temperature remains at -6 to -4 degrees Celsius, in order to achieve this effect, Guangzhou Sunac ski resort head Chang Hai revealed that the venue only 1 electricity bill, 1 year cost more than 25 million yuan, and the annual operating cost is about 40 million yuan.
To cover such a high cost, certain requirements are put forward for the consumption power of the target population. In Guangzhou Sunac Cultural Tourism City, the ticket for Sunac Park is 258 yuan, and the water world is 228 yuan; For skiing, only 2 hours of snow entertainment cost 228 yuan, beginner roads 3 hours 338 yuan, intermediate and advanced roads 4 hours 398 yuan, unlimited time tickets 458 yuan.
The results are good. According to data released by Guangzhou Sunac, from June 15, 2019 to September 30, 2020, more than 1 million tourists were welcomed. Based on the calculation of 250 yuan per capita, this brings 250 million yuan of revenue, and after deducting operating costs, it is expected that there will be about 200 million yuan of profit.
But you still have to see that this is in Guangzhou. As an economically developed first-tier city, it is not surprising that it can do this.
However, for cities with slightly backward economies in the north, in the face of the high construction costs in the early stage and the long-term maintenance of hundreds of thousands of consumer groups in the later stage, they still need to weigh their own strength.
In summary, China's ice and snow industry will develop from 600 billion to 1 trillion in 5 years, which is almost doubling the scale of the industry and containing coveted investment opportunities. But to seize this wave of dividends, we must have a more forward-looking vision, if you only stare at the ice and snow in the north, you will miss the best opportunity to share this wave of dividends.
On February 25th, Prospective Economist will hold the first trend seminar of 2022 "Deconstructing the New Meaning of the "White Economy" under the Trend of the Winter Olympics" to focus on the "hot economy" of the ice and snow industry! (Click on the image below to register directly)