Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, December 16 (Reporter Lu Xingji, Yang Fan, Li Dian, Qin Jing) Ice and snow used to be a daunting road, but now it has carried a rising new type of consumption and industrial clusters.
The Central Economic Work Conference held in Beijing from December 11 to 12 pointed out that it is necessary to cultivate and expand new types of consumption, vigorously develop digital consumption, green consumption, and healthy consumption, and actively cultivate new consumption growth points such as smart homes, cultural and entertainment tourism, sports events, and domestic "trendy products".
The reporter's investigation found that ice and snow-related consumption is becoming a new type of consumption, and the attempt to develop ice and snow into gold and silver has been effective, and the ice and snow economy is expected to help rural revitalization, promote employment and income, and drive enterprise transformation and upgrading.
Ice and snow consumption is heating up
A few years ago it was negligible, but now it is thriving. Ice and snow consumption is a typical new type of consumption, with rich scenes, diverse services and products, high consumption frequency and long chain.
"Do you want to go skiing together?" "Do you want to go skating together?" Ice and snow consumption reflects the people's demand for the high-quality development of cultural tourism, sports and other service industries in the new development stage, driven by the people's growing needs for a better life.
Chongli District, Zhangjiakou City, Hebei Province, is one of the venues for the 2022 Winter Olympics and has become one of the most popular ski destinations before and after the Winter Olympics. In December 2023, due to the difficulty of finding tickets for the high-speed train between Beijing and Chongli on weekends, the railway department opened a special ski tour train frequency for this purpose. Zhangjiakou Ningyuan Airport has also added several ski flights between it and southern cities.
On weekends, hotels of all sizes in Chongli are booked hotly, and many hotels close to the resorts are often full, and skiers need to book days or even weeks in advance. According to the real-time business consultation and booking volume of the local Fulong Ski Resort, the total number of ski guests is expected to exceed 600,000 this season, and the total number of visitors is expected to exceed 1.2 million with the addition of non-skiing tourists.
Not only Chongli, but the "winter" wind of the Winter Olympics generally blew "hot" ice and snow.
In November, data from life service e-commerce platforms such as Meituan and Dianping showed that searches for the keyword "skiing" in Jilin Province increased by 113% month-on-month, and the number of group purchase orders for "skiing" tickets increased by 598% year-on-year compared to 2019. According to data from Ctrip, a travel e-commerce platform, orders for ice and snow hotels with destinations in Jilin Province increased by 78% year-on-year in December, and orders for ice and snow group tours increased by nearly 10 times year-on-year.
Tickets for major ski resorts in Xinjiang's Altay region increased by 161.77% year-on-year in November on the Worthbuy technology distribution platform. More intuitive data is that from the 2016-2017 snow season to the 2021-2022 snow season, the number of tourists received by the Altay region in winter has increased sharply from 1.94 million to 11.9617 million.
The boom in ice and snow consumption is not limited to the north, and not only in winter. An indoor ski resort in Wuzhou, Guangxi, in southern China, has been doing a brisk summer this summer, sometimes welcoming thousands of people a day, while an indoor ski resort in Wuhan, in central China, welcomed more than 60,000 visitors in June and July. In addition to skiing, ice skating has also risen sharply in the south, and the ice rinks in many large shopping malls in Guangzhou and Shenzhen have been almost always saturated during the two summer vacations since the Beijing Winter Olympics......
In addition to buying tickets and booking accommodation, ice and snow-related sports equipment and clothing have also become a hot spot for consumption. Recently, the reporter saw in a shopping mall in Dongcheng District, Beijing, where dozens of ski equipment stores gathered, that even if it was close to 9 o'clock in the evening, there was still an endless stream of customers who came to buy ski equipment. In Chongli District, many tourists who have "tasted" skiing during the day will come to the ski shops of all sizes in the city at night, and there is no shortage of people carrying shopping bags on the cold streets.
Ice and snow villages, ice and snow employment is heating up
On the one hand, the ice and snow economy enhances people's sense of happiness and gain by providing high-quality cultural tourism and sports services to the people, and on the other hand, the ice and snow economy has a long industrial chain, many employment opportunities, and natural proximity to rural areas and remote areas, providing strong momentum for rural revitalization, employment and income increase.
The main industry of the village of Talat, near the Keketuohai Ski Resort in the Altay region, used to be agriculture and animal husbandry, and in the past, the village entered a state of "cat winter". In 2018, the village encouraged everyone to set up a homestay, and the villagers were very puzzled at first.
"Our village is so remote, and the winter is so cold, and there is nothing but snow, who wants to come and live?" asked Kulipare Habuli, a Kazakh woman.
The village cadres patiently came to her door to explain to her. It turns out that the nearby Keketuohai Ski Resort is about to be built, and skiers are expected to stop by here to experience the folk customs. "If the homestay in the village is built, the business will definitely be booming, and everyone will have a stable and considerable income. The village cadre assured.
Now, the vision has changed to a real increase in income and prosperity. The B&B of Kulipare's home has been open for more than 4 years, with an annual income of about 200,000 yuan. "In winter, the days are more prosperous", this is her intuitive and simple feeling of "ice and snow are also gold and silver mountains".
In Jilin Province, more than 20 restaurants have opened in Guosong Village, Donggang Town, 1 km away from the Wanda Ski Resort in Changbai Mountain, focusing on original Northeast specialties such as iron pot stew, sticky bean buns and pot wrapped meat. Xu Juan, the owner of a local iron pot stew restaurant, said: "This year's turnover has increased by 40% compared to last year, and we can sell nearly 50 pots a day. ”
Ice and snow companies such as ski resorts also have a strong demand for instructors and other staff, providing a large number of jobs. A large ski resort in Yongji County, Jilin Province alone, which can provide more than 2,000 jobs during the snow season, also cooperates with Jilin University, Northeast Normal University, Changchun University and other universities to provide employment Xi bases for college students.
In Guyuan County, Zhangjiakou City, Hebei Province, Kulunnaoer Tourist Resort took the opportunity of the 2022 Winter Olympics to launch winter skiing, skating and winter fishing projects in a timely manner, attracting many villagers to work in the scenic spot. Tian Yue, a villager who has planted wheat all her life, not only transferred 16 acres of land to the resort area, with a fixed income of more than 6,000 yuan per year, but also worked in the back kitchen of the resort, with a monthly salary of 3,600 yuan, and her income has increased several times compared with the past planting of wheat.
Ice and snow "intelligent manufacturing" is heating up
Extended by the service industries such as ice and snow cultural tourism and sports, the emerging ice and snow equipment manufacturing industry came into being, and some traditional equipment manufacturing enterprises have found new growth points. The hot consumption of ice and snow has also driven domestic enterprises to work creative design and brand development, upgrading from agency distribution and OEM production at the bottom of the international industrial chain to more lucrative original brand operation.
Since the beginning of 2023, Wang Huaqin, the head of a ski machine and dry snow park manufacturing enterprise with independent intellectual property rights in Luoyang, has been busy running around various installation sites and sports equipment exhibition sites around the world. He is very proud that the company has sold its self-developed equipment to Europe, America, Russia and other areas where ice and snow sports are the first. "There are even customers in Africa, Ghana, South Africa and other countries who are in contact with us. ”
Surprisingly, before the establishment of the ski product line "Snow Monkey", the company's main business was the manufacture of coal mining equipment.
"In 2012, I came into contact with snowboarding and found that the shock-absorbing material used by our company for coal mining conveyor belts can actually be transplanted to the snowboard binding, which is of high quality and low price compared with similar international products. This is the relationship between our company and skiing. ”
"Later, when the bid for the Beijing Winter Olympics was successful, I came into contact with some indoor dry snow projects, and we happened to have the ability to research and develop materials and mechanical design. Wang Huaqin introduced.
In this company's R&D laboratory, the reporter also saw that there are ski protective gear materials, snow wax and other products under development. In the backyard of the factory, a dry snow facility dedicated to halfpipe skills training is being tested. "Our self-developed products can bring down the prices of international sellers, but the performance will be improved. ”
In Beijing, ski retailer Lengshan is no longer satisfied with the simple agency and distribution of foreign brands. Since the beginning of the recent snow season, the company has climbed up the industrial chain from multiple directions.
"On the one hand, we are more deeply involved in the design and production of foreign brands, because now that China's ski market has grown, we can touch these upstream links that we could not touch in the past, and cooperate with them to develop products that are more suitable for the needs of Chinese." Lai Gang, the person in charge of Lengshan Company, said.
"On the other hand, we are also engaged in innovation incubation within the company, whether it is clothing or protective gear, some employees have creative and design capabilities, some employees are good at integrating supply chains, and some have experience in brand operation, so we encourage them to form small teams, and we have recently given birth to several original brands internally. ”