Each winter for the past three years, Claire Zhou, a teenager from the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, has counted down the days until she can fly to northern China and pull on a new ski suit and boots.<\/p>\n
The better she skis, the more frequently she upgrades her gear, reshaping her family\u2019s holiday budget and pulling them deeper into China\u2019s fast-growing winter sports consumption chain.<\/p>\n
The country\u2019s winter sports boom, sparked by the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and fuelled by supportive policies, has accelerated nationwide. Amid sluggish consumption nationwide, the ice and snow economy has emerged as one of the few segments consistently defying the broader downturn.<\/p>\n
The Zhou family used to travel to Southeast Asia during winter breaks, but it has headed to northern provinces such as Jilin and Liaoning since 2022.<\/p>\n
\u201cSkiwear and travel costs are definitely higher than trips to Southeast Asia,\u201d said Claire\u2019s mother, Monica He. \u201cWhile our daughter trained daily with her coach, we enjoyed leisure time locally. Last year we spent nearly 20,000 yuan (US$2,812) in Shenyang, and this year she most wants to go to the Altay Ski Resort in Xinjiang.\u201d<\/p>\n
Young consumers born in the 2000s and 2010s have become the fastest-growing demographic in the winter sports market, often influencing their families\u2019 holiday spending decisions.<\/p>\n
An iiMedia Research report on the winter sports industry\u2019s prospects for this coming winter said the market was worth just under 1.05 trillion yuan (US$147.7 billion) in 2024, and could surpass 1.5 trillion yuan by 2029.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Each winter for the past three years, Claire Zhou, a teenager from the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":155767,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[87947,87941,72,114,5768,113,87944,16547,87945,23727,87948,61,5700,60,87942,87946,87939,87940,2106,66154,87943],"class_list":{"0":"post-155766","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-altay-ski-resort","9":"tag-beijing-winter-olympics","10":"tag-business","11":"tag-china","12":"tag-consumption","13":"tag-economy","14":"tag-gansu-province","15":"tag-guangzhou","16":"tag-harbin-ice-and-snow-world","17":"tag-hebei-province","18":"tag-heilongjiang","19":"tag-ie","20":"tag-inner-mongolia","21":"tag-ireland","22":"tag-jilin","23":"tag-liaoning","24":"tag-skiing","25":"tag-snowboarding","26":"tag-supply-chain","27":"tag-winter-sports","28":"tag-xinjiang"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155766\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}