Around the 2022 Winter Olympics, everyone in this industry repeated the same number: 300 million Chinese people on snow and ice. Four years later, brands still quote it to me in meetings. It is the wrong number to build a business plan on. The real market is smaller, more concentrated, and structured very differently from what that headline suggests. Here is what the Chinese data actually says in 2026, and where a foreign brand still has room.
I am Olivier Verot, founder of Gentlemen Marketing Agency, based in Shanghai since 2012. We have run China market entry for outdoor and winter sports brands, from European ski apparel makers to hardgoods suppliers selling into Northeast resorts, and I have watched this market inflate and then settle.
What happened to the 300 million target
The target was real policy. Beijing committed to “driving 300 million people to participate in ice and snow sports” as part of its Olympic bid. And officially, it was hit. The National Bureau of Statistics ran a survey for the General Administration of Sport and published the result in January 2022: 346 million people had taken part in ice and snow activity as of October 2021.
Read the definition and the number deflates fast. “Participation” counts anyone who touched an ice or snow activity at least once since 2015. Ice skating on a shopping mall rink counts. A school outing counts. Sledding with the kids counts. It is a participation census, not a customer base.
The number that matters to a brand is different. According to the 2024-2025 China Ski Industry White Book by Benny Wu, China had 13.55 million individual skiers in that season. That is the actual pool. It grew 5.86% year on year, from 12.8 million. Solid growth, nothing like 300 million.
The 2026 numbers, in one table
The 2024-2025 snow season (the Chinese industry counts from 1 May to 30 April) is the last complete year with full published data. Here is the state of the market.
| Indicator | 2024-2025 season | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Skier visits (滑雪人次) | 26.05 million | +12.90% |
| Individual skiers | 13.55 million | +5.86% |
| Visits per skier per year | 1.92 | up from 1.80 |
| Ski resorts in operation | 748 | 22 new openings |
| Indoor snow centres | 66 | +10% |
| Indoor skier visits | 5.63 million | +15.37% |
| Indoor share of all visits | 21.61% | rising |
Look at the third line. 1.92 visits per skier per year. That single figure explains almost everything about how this market behaves.
Most Chinese skiers ski once and never come back
Roughly 80% of Chinese people on the slopes are one-time experiencers, according to research house Mob 研究院. Only 8.7% ski six times or more per season. The average skier goes fewer than twice a year.
Compare that with the Alps, where a committed skier books a week and takes 15 to 25 days on snow. Chinese resorts are not selling a sport. Most of them are selling a photo, a novelty afternoon, a family day out. The customer arrives in rented gear, spends three hours on a beginner slope, posts on Xiaohongshu, and moves on to the next weekend activity.
This changes the economics completely. A resort that depends on one-shot visitors has to keep buying new customers every season, because there is no returning base to amortise the investment. It also caps hardgoods demand. Nobody buys skis for a single day they may never repeat. They rent.
I tell every equipment brand the same thing: your addressable market is not 13.55 million people. It is the 8.7% who ski often enough to want their own gear, plus the apparel buyers, which is a much larger and looser group. More on that below.
748 resorts, but only a handful are real
China claims more ski areas than any other country. The count is technically true and commercially misleading. A large share of those 748 sites are small snow parks with a magic carpet, a short slope and no lift. They serve local families for an afternoon.
The original version of this article noted that China had around 20 resorts with a vertical drop over 300 metres, against more than 20 Alpine resorts with over 2,000 metres of drop. That gap has not closed. It cannot close, because it is geography, not investment. Chinese resorts are shorter, the snow is mostly man-made, and it is harder and more compact than natural Alpine snow.
The serious destinations sit in three clusters, and they are the ones worth targeting.
- Northeast (Jilin and Heilongjiang). Changbaishan, Beidahu, Yabuli, Harbin. Real vertical, real season length, the closest thing China has to a destination ski culture. Jilin has pushed hard on winter tourism as an economic replacement for old heavy industry.
- Xinjiang (Altay). The best natural snow in the country, marketed on the claim that Altay is the birthplace of skiing. It is far from everywhere, which makes it aspirational and expensive, and it attracts the enthusiast segment rather than the day-tripper.
- Chongli and the Beijing ring. Built for 2022, kept alive by weekend demand from the capital. High volume, short trips, intense competition on price.
The indoor market in the south is where growth actually is
This is the part most foreign brands miss. Indoor snow centres already generate 21.61% of all skier visits in China, and they are growing faster than outdoor resorts: 5.63 million visits, up 15.37%.
They are almost all in the south and east, in cities that have never seen snow: Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Chengdu, Wuhan, plus Zhejiang, Hunan, Hubei and Jiangsu. As of May 2025, seven of the ten largest indoor snow parks in the world by snow surface were in China. Shanghai’s Yaoxue ranks first globally.
For a brand, indoor changes the calendar and the customer. An outdoor resort sells four months a year to travellers. An indoor centre in Guangzhou sells twelve months a year to urban residents with high disposable income, inside a shopping mall, with retail space next to the slope. It is the closest thing to a permanent showroom that this market offers.
Outbound ski travel: still the premium segment
The wealthy and the committed still go abroad. The reasons have not changed since we first wrote this article, and they remain the honest weaknesses of the domestic product.
Cost effectiveness is one. That sounds counterintuitive for an international trip, but a Chinese instructor can charge over a thousand yuan for a half day, and lessons abroad are cheaper and better. Terrain is the other. Longer runs, natural snow, mature resort villages, ski-in accommodation, mountain restaurants.
Japan dominates because it is close, cheap on flights, and Hokkaido powder has become an identity marker on Chinese social media. Switzerland, France and Austria hold the prestige tier. Finland, Iceland and Norway sell the aurora and snow-experience package rather than the sport itself. The 2025-2026 winter saw China’s ice and snow economy pass one trillion yuan, with 360 million ice and snow leisure trips, up 15%, and over 450 billion yuan in tourism revenue.
Outbound demand has also shifted from group tours to customised and small-group trips: private instructors, boutique hotels, mountain dining, night activities. A resort or tourism board selling to China in 2026 should be pitching an itinerary, not a lift pass.
Where the real opportunity is for a foreign equipment brand
This is the section where I have to contradict the older version of this article. It said imported equipment was highly in demand and that domestic brands were weak. That was true in 2020. It is not true now.
Entry level is closed
China’s ski apparel market reached 13.29 billion yuan in 2024, out of a global market of 48.03 billion yuan. As of 31 December 2024, seven of the top ten best-selling ski apparel brands on Tmall were Chinese. Anta, Li-Ning, Toread and Bosideng all run ski lines. A wave of newer domestic labels (Nobaday, COSONE, Awka, Vector) owns the young beginner segment on Douyin and Xiaohongshu.
They also have the factories. China produces around 90% of the world’s ski apparel. A foreign brand trying to win an entry-level price war in China is fighting the supply chain from the wrong side. Do not do it.
Technical premium is open
The top of the value chain is still dominated by foreign brands, and Chinese industry reports say so openly: domestic ice and snow equipment manufacturing sits in the low and mid tiers. Skis, bindings, boots, high-end goggles, avalanche safety, touring gear. That is your space.
The customer is the 8.7%. They ski Hokkaido and Altay, they read gear reviews, they buy on specification and heritage, and they are proud of owning something a beginner would not recognise. Small group, high value, reachable with content rather than advertising spend.
Ski apparel is open for a different reason
Ski jackets are worn off the mountain. Ski apparel in China is partly a fashion category, driven by outdoor style and the Xiaohongshu photo. That widens your addressable market well beyond people who actually ski. A European brand with a recognisable silhouette and a real technical story can sell to buyers who ski twice a year and wear the jacket forty times.
How to actually enter, in 2026 terms
Xiaohongshu is the discovery engine, not Weibo
Chinese consumers research ski trips and gear by searching inside Xiaohongshu, not on a search engine. The mechanism matters: Xiaohongshu ranks notes on saves and comments, not just likes. A gear post that people bookmark keeps surfacing for months and pulls traffic long after publication. So you seed structured, useful content: “how to choose your first pair of all-mountain skis”, “what to pack for Hokkaido in January”, with your product visible but not the subject.
KOC and affiliation beat celebrity endorsement
The old advice was to sponsor Olympic athletes. That works for national brands with national budgets. For a foreign equipment brand it is money burnt. Better mechanism: recruit 50 to 200 KOCs (key opinion consumers, real skiers with 2,000 to 50,000 followers), give them product plus an affiliate link, and let the volume of authentic posts build search density inside Xiaohongshu and Douyin. Cost per post is a fraction of a KOL fee, and the aggregate content is what the algorithm rewards.
Douyin interest e-commerce for apparel, Tmall for credibility
Douyin does not wait for someone to search. It pushes your video to users whose behaviour signals outdoor interest, and they buy inside the app without ever knowing your brand beforehand. That works well for jackets and accessories with an obvious visual hook. It works badly for a 6,000 yuan pair of skis, where the buyer needs specification and reassurance. Keep Tmall or JD for hardgoods and for the credibility a flagship store gives you. Decathlon’s move upmarket in China is a useful case study on how price positioning gets read by Chinese consumers.
Get quoted by the AI assistants
A growing share of Chinese buyers now ask DeepSeek or Doubao questions like “which ski brands are good for intermediates”. These models pull from Chinese-language content: Baidu Baike, Zhihu answers, industry articles, forum threads. If your brand does not exist in Chinese text, the AI will not mention it, and no amount of ad spend fixes that. Publishing structured Chinese content about your category, with your brand named in factual context, is now part of the baseline.
Private domain for a low-frequency purchase
Ski gear is bought once every few years. Paying to acquire that customer again each season is how brands lose money here. Push every buyer into a WeChat group or service account, then run pre-season content, tuning tips, resort news and group buys. The acquisition cost is paid once and the customer stays reachable for free.
Case study: a Czech ski brand that stopped chasing volume
Pavel runs a Czech ski and outerwear company, mid-size, strong in Central Europe, technical reputation among people who ski a lot. He came to us after two years of trying to grow in China through a distributor.
The problem was clear from the numbers. The distributor had positioned his entry-level jackets against domestic brands at around 1,200 yuan. Sell-through was under 30%, and the distributor was discounting to move stock, which put the brand into a permanent promotion loop. Two years, roughly 400,000 euros of inventory pushed into China, no brand recognition to show for it. He was competing on price against companies manufacturing next door.
What had already failed: a Tmall flagship opened too early with no traffic behind it, and a Weibo account posting product photos to 800 followers. Both were doing what the 2020 playbook said to do.
What we changed. First, we cut the entry range from the China assortment entirely and led with the technical line at 3,500 to 6,000 yuan. Fewer units, defensible margin, no direct fight with Anta. Second, we built Xiaohongshu content around Altay and Hokkaido, the two places his target customer actually goes, and worked with 60 KOCs who ski rather than 3 lifestyle influencers who do not. Third, we published Chinese technical content about ski construction and fabric so the brand name would appear in the sources the AI assistants read.
Why it worked: the premium buyer wants a brand no beginner has heard of. Being unknown to the mass market was an asset once we stopped selling to the mass market.
After 14 months, Pavel’s China revenue was up 62% on lower unit volume, gross margin went from 22% to 41%, and the Xiaohongshu account was generating enough inbound that two Northeast specialty retailers approached him instead of the other way around. Slower than he wanted. Profitable, which the previous two years were not.
FAQ
Is the Chinese ski market still growing, or did it peak with the Olympics?
It is growing, just not at the rate the Olympic-era projections claimed. Skier visits rose 12.90% to 26.05 million in the 2024-2025 season and individual skiers rose 5.86% to 13.55 million. The post-Olympic dip that many predicted did not happen. What did happen is that growth moved from hype-driven expansion to steady, indoor-led, urban demand. Plan on high single-digit to low double-digit annual growth, not the exponential curve you saw in 2019 forecasts.
Should I sell ski equipment or ski apparel in China?
Apparel has the bigger addressable market because jackets get worn off the mountain, but it is also where domestic brands are strongest at entry price. Hardgoods have a smaller buyer pool, mostly the 8.7% who ski six or more times a year, but far less domestic competition at the technical end. If you have a genuine technical story, hardgoods and premium apparel together are the workable combination. Entry-level anything is a losing fight.
Do I need a Chinese entity to start?
No. Most brands we work with start with cross-border e-commerce, which lets you ship from abroad, avoids full product registration, and tests demand with limited capital. You will need a local entity later for a Tmall flagship, domestic warehousing and B2B sales to resorts and retailers. Test first with cross-border and Xiaohongshu content, then invest once you can see which SKUs and which regions respond.
How long before a ski brand sees results in China?
The season structure forces patience. Buying intent concentrates from October to February, so a launch outside that window spends months building content with little sales feedback. Realistically, budget one full season to build visibility and a second to convert it. Brands that expect revenue in three months either overspend on ads or discount their way into the wrong positioning, and both are hard to undo.
Working with us
Gentlemen Marketing Agency has been in Shanghai since 2012 and we handle winter sports and outdoor brands entering China: Xiaohongshu and Douyin content, KOC recruitment among real skiers, Tmall and cross-border e-commerce, and visibility inside Chinese AI assistants. We know which resort regions and which retail partners are worth your time, and which are not. Contact us for a free audit of your current China presence.
