Snow Business: Inside China’s Billion-Dollar Bet on Winter Sports
Jiang Zehui sat on the edge of her seat alongside 6,000 spectators, heart pounding as she watched ice hockey players clash at the Asian Winter Games.
“The atmosphere was electric,” Jiang told Sixth Tone on the sidelines of the Games in the northeastern city of Harbin this month. “My daughter said she fell in love with the sport after watching the game.”
The Games, alongside the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022, have fueled an explosion of interest in winter exercise in China. Almost 60 million people across the country participated in some variety of winter sports during the 2023-2024 winter season, according to the General Administration of Sport.
That includes the likes of 32-year-old Jiang. She took up snowboarding in 2021, initially to “pose in cool outfits for social media photos.” But snowboarding soon became an exhilarating escape from the pressures of work and caring for two children.
“It’s incredibly relaxing,” she said. “When I’m boarding, I feel like a heroine from the fantasy TV shows I watched as a child who could soar through the air, standing on their sword.”
Jiang spends about 20,000 yuan ($2,800) a year on her passion, covering equipment, travel, and entry costs to ski resorts and tutor training. China’s government is counting on enthusiasts like her to drive what it calls the “ice and snow economy,” especially in colder regions that have lagged behind economically.
The sector, consisting mainly of tourism centered around winter activities and extending to the manufacturing of sports equipment, generated revenue of 970 billion yuan last year, according to official data.
China’s central government wants that number to increase by 50% by the end of this decade, according to a plan published in November.
And the ice and snow economy was one of the few sectors to be called out by name in China’s top annual economic planning meeting in December. Economists say that’s part of a wider shift toward a greater emphasis on consumption as a growth driver.
“The central government is placing greater emphasis on consumer spending, particularly in the services sector,” said Wang Yuxiong, director of the Sports Economics Research Center at the Central University of Finance and Economics.
As China’s population becomes wealthier, spending is tilting away from goods like food and clothing in favor of services. One example is tourism: Tourist spending during this year’s Spring Festival rose 7% from a year earlier, faster than the growth of spending in retail stores.
“The ice and snow economy has the potential to sustain high-speed growth over the long term,” Wang added.
The Asian Winter Games featured more than a thousand athletes from over 30 countries competing in speed skating, skiing, snowboarding, ice hockey, and curling. China topped the event’s medal table for the first time since 2007.
A decade ago, few winter athletes were widely known in China. This year’s Games have helped cement the celebrity status of the likes of aerial skier Xu Mengtao, speed skater Gao Tingyu, and short-track speed skater Lin Xiaojun. Eileen Gu, who became the world’s youngest freestyle skiing Olympic Champion in 2022, was absent due to injury.
Harbin is known in China as an “Ice and Snow City” because of its freezing winter temperatures and an annual Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival spread around 1 million square meters and featuring castles and towers carved from frozen water. Highlighting the economic pull of ice, the event draws millions of tourists to the city each year.
The capital of northeast China’s Heilongjiang province, bordering Russia, Harbin first hosted an Asian Winter Games in 1996. Back then, Heilongjiang and its two neighboring provinces made up about 10% of China’s economy, but the region has since fallen behind the rest of the country in terms of incomes, and now accounts for less than 5% of national output.
Incomes in another two regions with lengthy snow seasons, the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in northern China and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the Northwest, also lag behind the national average. China’s government is hoping that the ice and snow economy can inject new vibrancy into those economies in particular.
The biggest drivers of the ice and snow economy are tourist trips to winter sports resorts and to frozen scenery and spectacles. Two such events involve fishermen hauling fish from frozen lakes and snow bonfire parties featuring dragon dancing.
This winter, households will spend more than 630 billion yuan on ice and snow-related tourist trips, according to a report by China Tourism Research Institute. That spending is possible in part because of a huge expansion of winter sports venues nationwide — reaching nearly 3,000 in 2023, according to official data, nearly double that of five years earlier.
That requires serious spending on construction, and China’s snow tourism sector spent about 100 billion yuan last year on building infrastructure, according to official data.
Across northern China, local governments have been encouraged to convert public areas like parks and plazas into winter sports spaces. The region has a legacy of heavy industry, and old factories and warehouses have also been repurposed. In Shanxi province, former coal mines have been turned into ski resorts which received nearly 250,000 visitors in the 2023-2024 snow season.
Hou, the mother of a 2-year-old from the northeastern Jilin province, says that the spread of skiing facilities in her area provides a rare opportunity for outdoor activity during long, cold winters.
“The winter in Northeast China is freezing, and there are very few outdoor activities compared to summer. Skiing became a great option for kids,” she said. “Otherwise, my daughter would just stay indoors playing with toys or watching TV, and would easily get bored.”
The facilities aren’t just attracting locals. Jilin province alone received 125 million tourists last snow season, more than doubling year on year and driving spending of more than 240 billion yuan.
While the sector is already large, there’s plenty of space for growth. China’s State Council last year set an ambitious plan for the country’s ice and snow economy revenue to reach 1.5 trillion yuan by 2030, implying annual growth of about 7% until then.
To put that in perspective, revenue in China’s automobile industry was about 10 times larger than that last year. The share of people with experience in ice and snow activities and per capita spending remain low compared to developed economies, according to Wang, the economist.
But firms are facing challenges in establishing profitable business models after the huge expansion in capacity, he added.
“Companies in the area should avoid following trends blindly. Improving service levels, enhancing consumer experience and satisfaction, and cultivating customer loyalty are key priorities,” he said.
Beyond the North
The rise of the ice and snow economy has hit southern regions too.
The Yangtze River Delta region around Shanghai now has 15 indoor ski resorts, and the city opened the world’s largest last year. Covering over 350,000 square meters and capable of hosting 5,000 skiers at once, the L+SNOW resort was reported to have cost around 7 billion yuan to build.
China’s South is also where most of the manufacturing activity associated with winter sports is taking place.
The biggest players in the market are sportswear giants like Anta, based in eastern China’s Fujian province, owner of exclusive rights to Japanese winterwear brand Descente in China. Company executives projected last year the brand would soon generate 10 billion yuan in annual revenue.
The number of Chinese winter equipment companies reached 900 in 2023, tripling since 2015, Hao Lishun, an official at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, told reporters in November.
Specialized industrial clusters have emerged, such as Shenzhen Town in eastern Zhejiang province’s Ninghai County, which has earned a reputation as “China’s Sports Pole Town.”
Locals date the origins of the industry back to the late 1990s, when a company founder was inspired by aluminum poles he saw at a trade show in Germany. The town, which already produced aluminum, now accounts for 60% of the world’s sports pole market, making some 15 million each year.
The town’s firms have generally focused on exports, but that’s changing as the rise of winter sports drives domestic demand for skis, snowboards, winter clothing, and accessories.
The share of output going to overseas markets is falling from its current level of about 90%, says Liu Wen, the administrative manager of Leisure Products Co., Ltd., which specializes in ski and trekking poles, as well as snow shoes.
“When Beijing won the (Olympic) bid, we realized that snow sports would take off in China, and we immediately invested in developing ski poles, from their design to securing intellectual property rights,” he added. The company’s patent for a ski pole locking device has been licensed for use by international brands such as Italy’s Masters, he said.
He added that the domestic industry is faster-paced than the overseas market. “A product launched this month can have customer reviews and insights by the next month.”
That real-time response fuels innovation. The company developed a quick-release mechanism between the strap and the pole after Chinese customers said that traditional wrist straps were inconvenient to use when wearing gloves.
Wang Nengfang, a Leisure Products worker, said she has become busier than ever as the factory now churns out 1,000 snowshoes and up to 12,000 sports poles each day. She’s now earning about 20% more than in 2021 ahead of the Beijing Winter Olympics, she said.
Chen Mingchun, assistant general manager of Zhejiang Vista Sports Goods Co., Ltd., a leading manufacturer of snow sports helmets, said he’s adjusted his products to suit Asian head shapes, which, he claims, tend to be rounder.
Sales to Chinese customers have grown faster than exports, pushing the share of domestic sales to 12% compared with just 2% in 2020.
Local government officials in Wenling, Zhejiang, where the company is based, have promoted the industry by establishing manufacturing standards for ice and snow gear, as well as making connections between the companies and ski resorts in the Northeast and in Xinjiang, Chen said.
The company has seen total annual sales grow by 10–20% since the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
“Right now, winter sports are in high demand. Our production orders for 2025 are already scheduled through June,” he said.
Editor: Tom Hancock.
(Header image: A women’s ice hockey match during the 2025 Asian Winter Games in Harbin, Heilongjiang province, Feb. 14, 2025. VCG)
