Ski-obsessed China presents opening for Austria’s Skidata

It’s a long way from Austria’s iconic Hahnenkamm downhill course to the gentler pistes of northeastern China, but Hugo Rohner is returning to tap into Beijing’s new-found fixation with skiing.

Rohner, 43, runs Austria’s Skidata, which has sold its management system – allowing skiers to buy tickets online and getting them onto lifts at a faster pace through automatic turnstiles – to ski resorts from Kitzbuehel, with its famous Streif run, to Verbier in Switzerland and Aspen in the U.S. He plans to go back to China next month, following a visit in January, to continue talks with a couple of “more established” ski resorts.

Skidata’s push to find new markets comes as Chinese President Xi Jinping tries to turn 300 million people to winter sports by the time Beijing hosts the 2022 Winter Olympics. Rohner doesn’t underestimate the scale of the challenge: he says the Chinese market of about 8 million skier days a year is only an eighth the size of the U.S. and one sixteenth of Europe’s.

“I have absolutely no doubt it will go to 10-12 million; the question is, will it go up to 20 million?” said Rohner, a Swiss national who grew up skiing in the resort of Lenzerheide. “China has strong political plans to put people into skiing. In the end they need to create the middle class that sees skiing or snowboarding as a lifestyle.”

Getting the Skidata’s brand name known early is key to winning business in China, he said. “One needs to be there from the start.”

Rohner declined to name the resorts he’s in discussions with. Among the biggest are in Yabuli, north of Harbin, and Huaibei near Beijing.

In the Chinese capital alone, city officials plan to boost revenue from winter sports and tourism to about $6 billion by 2022, and get a third of Beijing’s more than 20 million people’s onto skis, sleds and skates. Bloomberg