At a sports conference held in December 28, Mr. Liu Peng, Minister of State General Administration of Sports, revealed that the Chinese sports sector reached a business scale of 1.357471 trillion yuan in 2014.

He said, “As the business scale of the Chinese sports industry has grown, sports-related consumption has increased significantly. China achieved a 1.357471 trillion-yuan sports industry in 2014, accounting for 0.64 percent of GDP with an added value of RMB404.098 billion. As the structure of the sports industry improves, the integration between sports and culture, tourism, health care, and the Internet will deepen.” 

In an earlier statement, a senior sports official claimed that China’s sports industry is expected to account for 0.7 percent of GDP with an added value of 400 billion yuan in 2015 and by 2020, the total business scale of the Chinese sports industry is expected to exceed 3 trillion yuan.

The Chinese central government has projected a 5-trillion target for its sports industry by 2025 in a reform plan issued last October. Following the publication of the plan, several local governments also laid out their individual projections for the industry, which add up to 7-trillion yuan by 2025, 2 trillion more than the central government’s 5 trillion target. 

Source: Xinhua

Proofread by John Devlin