Acting upon New Trends and Leading the Way: ISPO Beijing 2024 Grandly Opens
On January 12, 2024, the ISPO Beijing 2024 commenced its grand opening at the China National Convention Center in Beijing. With sports and outdoor brands undergoing iterative upgrades and repositioning over the years, new consumers and market participants are entering the industry. At this moment, ISPO is celebrating its 20th year in China.
Emphasizing the theme "Accelerating the Reform of the Sports Industry and Promoting the Development of Sports Culture", ISPO Beijing 2024 brought together nearly 500 domestic and international sports lifestyle brands, showcasing cutting-edge products and technologies across various categories, including Outdoor sports, Winter sports, Camping lifestyle, Urban sports, Extreme sports, Cycling, Car travel, and Skateboarding. Covering an expansive 35,000 square meters, the exhibition aimed to exhibit the innovative progress and development of the sports and outdoor industry to practitioners and enthusiasts.
The exhibition featured ten forums and independent exhibition areas, focusing on hot topics such as Outdoor sports, Sports tourism, Sustainable ski resort operation, Camping, Sports fashion, Textile & Technology, Car travel, Marketing innovation and Sports rehabilitation. These discussions aimed to explore the industry's pain points, difficulties, and development trends from different angles and levels, fostering a new batch of growth points in the field.
Over 100 international brands, constituting nearly 30% of the total, participated in the exhibition. Notably, brands from Canada, Japan, and other regions showcased their distinctive features through national pavilions. The addition of new categories like RVs, motorcycles, cycling, skateboarding, and pickleball occupied more than 50% of the total display space, reflecting the vibrant vitality and boundless potential of the diversified sports lifestyle market.
Pioneering Industrial Exploration by Addressing the Market Needs:
Aligned with the concept of commercial joint development, the Beijing Chamber of Commerce identified opportunities for multi-industry cooperation in outdoor and commercial, FMCG, beauty, and traditional culture sectors. These directions presented essential ideas for integrated industrial development, cross-section interaction, and collective improvement, offering avenues for increased business opportunities.
ISPO, in collaboration with the Daily Sports channel of People.cn, unveiled the "High-Quality Development Empowerment Plan for China's Outdoor Sports Industry". The plan aimed to further the integrated development of outdoor and sports, cultural and tourism resources, activating land and other idle resources and stimulating the symbiosis of the outdoor sports industry and urban resources.
The intersection of fashion and sustainable development has always taken center stage among the industry. At ISPO Beijing 2024, the Sustainable Fashion and Sports Trend release area highlighted activities aimed at fostering sustainable innovation and development within the fashion and sports industry.
To accommodate new market participants and consumers, ISPO Beijing 2024 introduced ISPO New brand hub, focusing on emerging outdoor brands' diverse features like lightweight design, new materials, sustainability, and innovative design.
The expansion of outdoor sports encompassed its deep integration with bicycling, motorcycling and RV travelling. ISPO has introduced the Road trip lifestyle and the ISPO Motolife for the first time, expanding the existing ISPO Cycling lifestyle hub. This move covered the entire industry chain of cycling and motorcycling, showcasing the interconnected experiences of different outdoor activities and products, promoting further integrated development.
Spotlight on Trendy Outdoor Topics
Pickleball and skateboarding has emerged as two popular sports garnering widespread attention. The ISPO Urban skate block and ISPO Urban sports zone is creating a hub for brands, businesses, clubs, and sports enthusiasts. The area integrated exhibition games and on-site experiences, showcasing the unique charm of trendy sports and exploring additional market possibilities.
Extreme sports have become a lifestyle choice for many seeking adventure, sports experience and self-expression. ISPO, in collaboration with Zhang Jing (Mars), the manager of the XFINE club, created the Extreme Sports Carnival. The event aimed to showcase the cultural charm behind the thrills of extreme sports to a broader audience of sports enthusiasts.
The ISPO Climbing hub, adhering to the philosophy of “making rock climbing accessible to more people”, provided technical explanations, environmental protection lectures, and interactive experiences of outdoor climbing and ice climbing. The addition of a new dragon-shaped rock wall added excitement and engagement, maintaining a high level of viewing pleasure and experiential enjoyment.
The ISPO Sustainability hub revolved around the theme "Living with Nature" by seamlessly integrating outdoor experience and sustainable advocacy. The focus included urban biodiversity observation, zero waste, sustainable outdoor lifestyle, and a symbiotic-based exploration of Beijing, the city we live in.
The ISPO Water Sports Carnival, popular throughout the summer, dived underwater in winter. Combining an Undersea photography exhibition with a mermaid costume show, the event revealed the mesmerizing scenery of the underwater world, narrating stories of the interaction between people and the ocean.
The ISPO Textrends Award showcased breakthroughs in award-winning products across different scenarios and functional dimensions, offering crucial inspiration and guidance for sports fashion and sustainability.
With the theme centered on “Invigorating outdoor pursuits”, the Commercial Office of the Canadian Embassy in China, along with the Canadian pavilion featuring nine sports equipment, clothing, and fashion companies, collaboratively showcased Canada's abundant outdoor resources and the thriving outdoor and ice and snow sports industry during the promotional event.
“Embark on an extraordinary expedition and venture into the world's mountains together”. Renowned domestic brand Toread unveiled its 25th-anniversary gift, the HIMEX series, making its global debut at ISPO Beijing 2024. Embodying the spirit of extreme exploration, the HIMEX series braves the harshest environments worldwide. Through wind, frost, rain, and snow, it allows enthusiasts to share in moments of glory.
Belgian outdoor shoe brand Safety Jogger unveiled a comprehensive upgrade of its brand image, introducing a lifestyle business line alongside its professional outdoor line. The W24 series made its world premiere, offering safety, security, and comfort to a broader audience of sports lifestyle enthusiasts.
In collaboration with Taobao·Tmall Sports and Outdoors, ISPO presented the "Annual Stormwear Jacket Hexagon Standard Awards". Notable domestic and foreign brands like Camel, Columbia, DECATHLON, KAILAS, Pioneer Camp, and Panda received recognition for their award-winning products.
For the first time, ISPO concurrently partnered with Douyin, RED, Dewu, Zhihu, and other platforms to disseminate thematic content. This collaborative effort aimed to conduct in-depth discussions on vertical topics, cultivate content in the public domain, gain insights into sports trends, and reach a broader audience, breaking barriers in sports lifestyle circles.
Professionals Speak Out for the Future of the Industry
The return of the Alpitec China-Asia Pacific Snow Conference (APSC) emphasized the selection and refined operation of ski resort equipment and facilities, laying a foundation for the steady development of China's ice and snow industry in the post-Winter Olympics era.
The ISPO Sports Tourism Destination Conference is held in Beijing for the first time, combining traditional sports, modern events, and outdoor sports to promote new sports and leisure formats, expanding space for the in-depth integration of sports, culture, tourism, and business.
The first Conference on Cross-Border Integration and Innovative Development in the Road Trip Industry facilitated discussions among industry leaders, experts, scholars, entrepreneurs, and other stakeholders to drive the development of the car and travel industry.
The Outdoor Marketing Innovation Forum addressed the challenges of winning opportunities for long-term development in a market undergoing continuous reshaping and reshuffling. The forum aimed to help practitioners explore marketing plans aligned with their brand development, finding scientific and effective marketing paths.
Camping, as a model of combining sports and lifestyle, became a focal point of the show. The Camping Sustainable Development Forum united the industry to explore the path of sustainable development in the camping economy, opening up interaction between upstream and downstream industry chains.
ISPO continued its commitment to using sports life as a link, building an industry exchange platform, and promoting industry refinement and expansion that lead to market innovation and growth potential. By sharing cutting-edge sports lifestyle and trends, ISPO aimed to spread sports life concepts and expand sports consumer groups, further driving the robust growth of the sports lifestyle industry.
Messe München
As one of the world’s leading trade fair organizers, Messe München presents the world of tomorrow at its more than 80 trade fairs worldwide. These include eleven of the world’s leading trade fairs such as bauma, BAU, IFAT, electronica, and ISPO. Messe München’s portfolio comprises trade fairs for capital and consumer goods, as well as for new technologies. Together with its subsidiaries, it organizes trade fairs in below countries and regions: China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong (China), Thailand, and the U.S. With the ICM – International Congress Center Messe München, the CCN – Conference Center North, and the MOC – Event Center Messe München, it offers space for a wide variety of events. With around 1,000 employees in Germany and abroad, a network of over 15 affiliated companies, and almost 70 representations worldwide, Messe München is active in more than 130 countries and regions. The more than 150 events held annually in Germany and abroad attract around 50,000 exhibitors and around three million visitors. Messe München thus generates annual indirect profitability of more than 2,5 billion euros in Bavaria, and creates around 23,000 jobs in the region, making it a driving force for the economy and tourism. Messe München has the greenest and one of the most state-of-the-art exhibition centers in the world and, with an exhibition area of 200,000 m2 in 18 halls and 414,000 m2 of outdoor space, has one of the largest total areas. Messe München will celebrate its 60th anniversary in 2024.
About ISPO
As a global sports business platform, ISPO acts as a partner to the sports industry. The ISPO family of brands includes the multi-segment trade fairs for sports business professionals in the world, encompassing ISPO Munich, ISPO Beijing, OutDoor by ISPO and ISPO Shanghai, the ISPO.com online news portal together with its own editorial team, and the ISPO Academy, ISPO Collaborators Club, ISPO Brandnew, ISPO Award, ISPO Textrends, and ISPO Job market. By bringing together all of these strands, ISPO is able to offer companies support at every stage of development on the global sports markets all year round —identifying relevant market developments, driving forward innovation, and pooling specialized consumer experts so that guidance on the international markets can be provided.