Club Med owner bets on winter sports in China as skiing craze creates ‘severe shortage’

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‘Tourist attractions featuring snow and ice will be our major growth engine,’ says Fosun Tourism co-president Andrew Xu

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Fosun Tourism’s Taicang Alps Resort in East China’s Jiangsu province, which opened in November, drew 290,000 visitors in the first half of 2024. Photo: Handout

Daniel Renin Shanghai

Published: 2:30pm, 25 Aug 2024

Fosun Tourism Group, the Chinese owner of the Club Med resort chain, is betting on winter sports facilities to tap people’s mounting zeal for skiing and skating even as tourists are spending less on food and hotels when visiting scenic spots.

Andrew Xu, co-president of Fosun Tourism, said top ski resorts and entertainment complexes are still in severe shortage in mainland China, where spending on winter sports soared tenfold to 150 billion yuan (US$21 billion) over the past four years.

“Tourist attractions featuring snow and ice will be our major growth engine,” Xu said during a results briefing in Shanghai on Friday. “Based on our analysis, the country has only 14 top-notch ski resorts with scale and quality, although the winter sports industry is growing fast.”

He added that the company, the leisure and tourism unit of Shanghai-based conglomerate Fosun International, remains determined to chase revenue growth via an asset-light strategy with a focus on managing resorts for more owners of assets across the mainland.

An asset-light strategy refers to a business model under which a company has only a small amount of fixed assets on its balance sheet. Club Med now operates three all-inclusive winter resorts in China.

Winter sports, still basking in the afterglow of Beijing’s successful hosting of the Winter Olympics in 2022, have become a bright spot in China’s travel industry, with the number of indoor ski resorts surging to more than 50 from just five in 2013, according to market research firm Daxue Consulting.

Last month, a report compiled by China’s General Administration of Sport showed that spending on skiing and skating by mainland consumers topped 150 billion yuan annually, or 1,000 yuan per capita.