Ningbo -Women’s tennis targets growth in Asia, China in particular

By Douglas Robson, Special for USA TODAY
“…. the northeast seaport city of Ningbo already spent $200 million for a lavish aquatics and tennis facility in a build-it-and-they-will-come strategy, according to Shoemaker. The city has applied to host a lower-level International Tennis Federation event.”

If Asia, and particularly China, is key for any business with global ambitions, count in women’s tennis, too.
With its growing cadre of stars, surging investment, government backing and compelling demographics, China is increasingly where the Sony Ericsson WTA Tour is betting on its future expansion.
The linchpin of this trend is this week’s China Open at the Beijing Olympic venue, one of two women’s tour stops in China. The other is in Guangzhou.
Both events are in their sixth year, but for the first time Beijing is a mandatory, top-level WTA Tour stop offering $4.5 million in prize money. It coincides with a men’s tournament at the same venue.
“We see Asia as a strategic pillar to long-term and sustainable growth,” WTA CEO Stacey Allaster says.
The WTA has homed in on China as a hub for expansion in the Asia/Pacific region for obvious reasons.
Its population (1.3 billion) is huge. It has the world’s fastest growing Internet and mobile-phone markets, plus a tradition with racket sports such as badminton and table tennis. It has an untapped and expanding middle class eager to exploit its newfound wealth on leisure activities.
Already 130 million Chinese are “interested” in tennis and 5 million are active participants, according to the Chinese Tennis Association (CTA), which is about the same number as France. Half are women.
“The demographics are perfectly aligned as a growth market for us,” says WTA President David Shoemaker, who relocated to Beijing to open the WTA’s third foreign office 18 months ago.
Other tour efforts — it launched a Chinese version of its website and in 2011 will stage its year-end championships in the Eurasian city of Istanbul — have been met with willing partners in the CTA and the country’s central government, which pegged tennis several years ago as a top priority and has offered tax incentives for investment in tennis facilities and infrastructure. The country now boasts roughly 65,000 tennis courts, which are multiplying by 15% annually, according to sports marketing firm Infront Sports and Media.
On court, the China Open has served up ample evidence that the coming wave of stars could very well hail from Asia.
Three current or former No. 1s —Dinara Safina, Jelena Jankovic and Maria Sharapova— all lost to Chinese opponents (though some will say this has more to do with Safina’s state of mind, Jankovic’s gimpy wrist and Sharapova’s exhaustion).
Unseeded wild card Shuai Zhang upended top-ranked Safina in the opening round, and 53rd-ranked Peng Shuai defeated last year’s No. 1 Jankovic and former No. 1 Sharapova. Zhang lost in the fourth round to No. 14 seed Marion Bartoli on Thursday; Shuai takes on No. 13 seed Nadia Petrova in the quarterfinals Friday.
And these are not even the country’s most successful exports. That would be Li Na and Jie Zheng, established pros with strong credentials that have already cracked the top 20.
The 5-4 ½ Zheng, ranked No. 31, reached the semifinals at Wimbledon last year to become the first Chinese player to reach the last four at a major. Sturdy baseliner Li owns two WTA titles and is a two-time Grand Slam quarterfinalist, including this year’s U.S. Open where she lost to eventual winner Kim Clijsters.
Both say they have seen massive changes in the last decade, and both agree that continued tennis development depends on ground-level investment.
“I think this is like a pyramid,” 16th-ranked Li said through a translator. “The bigger the base is, the higher the top will be.”
Shoemaker says China reminds him of Russia in the 1990s, where the opening to West following the crumbling of the Soviet Empire, coupled with a strong athletic tradition and dangling dollar signs, translated into a wave of success in women’s tennis. Today, more than a quarter of the WTA top-20 hail from Russia.
The ATP Tour has made similar inroads, launching its website in Chinese and locating the prestigious year-end Masters Cup in Shanghai from 2006-08 (it moves to London in November). Next week, it stages a Masters 1000 tournament in Shanghai, one of two tour-level events in the country.
“China has had a meteoric rise on the world tennis stage in the last decade to become a significant player on the world tennis stage,” Brad Drewett, CEO of the ATP’s international group, said in a statement earlier this year.
However, no one seems to have an answer for the lack of success on the men’s side. While there are three Chinese women in the top 100, the top-ranked male is No. 396 Shao-Xuan Zeng.
If the seeds of growth were already taking root in China, what galvanized public and private forces was Li Ting and Sun Tiantian’s surprise gold medal in doubles at the 2004 Athens Olympics. So says Guoli Ma, who founded giant broadcaster CCTV in 1989 and ran its sports division from 1995-2005.
“That women’s doubles final was one of the highest rated of the whole Olympics because of the Chinese players,” says Ma, who oversaw CCTV’s coverage of the Beijing Olympics and now runs an international marketing company based in Switzerland.
That spark carried over to Beijing, where matches featuring Chinese players drew ratings similar to basketball and soccer, the country’s most popular sports. Today CCTV, which owns the broadcasting rights for the WTA and ATP and reaches 330 million homes, airs some 600 hours of tennis a year, the third most of any sport.
As a result, cities have been eager to open their wallets and promote themselves through the sport, where top Chinese players such as Li and Zheng are well known and routinely rank in the top 10 of surveys for the country’s most recognized athletes.
WTA officials have been working closely with local authorities and CTA officials to meet the increasing tennis thirst. For instance, the northeast seaport city of Ningbo already spent $200 million for a lavish aquatics and tennis facility in a build-it-and-they-will-come strategy, according to Shoemaker. The city has applied to host a lower-level International Tennis Federation event.
“They are desperate to ratchet up the level of tennis they have,” Shoemaker says, noting that unlike many other parts of the world “the difference is how much the city governments are looking to use budgets to promote tennis as part of larger development plan.”
Companies also are looking to tennis as a way to gain a foothold. Chinese sporting goods giant Li-Ning inked a licensing agreement with the ATP Tour three years ago, and Serbian Star Jankovic signed a long-term, multimillion dollar clothing deal with Chinese-based Anta last year.
“We expect more and more Chinese superstars from the women and maybe the men will come,” Ma says. “If we can find this kind of talented group, Chinese tennis interest will be much bigger in the future.”
To be sure, there are challenges to doing business in China.
The government’s hand is everywhere and bureaucratic red tape is thick and layered. The country still lacks an adequate number of lower-level feeder tournaments for aspiring pros to gain valuable ranking points and move up the ladder. Some even say the tours have arrived too late, especially when compared to the NBA, which opened an office in Hong Kong in 1992 and became the first U.S. sports league to stage games in China in 2004.
“By no means are we anywhere near what this market can become,” Shoemaker concedes.
Another key is making sure grass-roots efforts such as recent tennis festivals in large malls in Guangzhou and Beijing can bring the sport to the masses. Public investment in facilities must keep it affordable and accessible.
“I think we need to attract more and more kids, young people, juniors, participating in this sport,” said star player Zheng through a translator. “Younger Chinese players need to have more chances to play in higher-level tournaments. Only when they are playing at higher-level tournaments will they be able to raise their performance level.”
One thing China does not lack is ambition.
That holds true at the China Open, where a 15,000-seat stadium with a retractable roof is being built for next year’s tournament. Attendance is up three-fold vs. 2008 (although it was staged at a different venue), and organizers expect a week-long total of 250,000-300,000 fans. That’s on par with the audience at more established combined events at Indian Wells, Calif. (332,000) and Miami (293,000) this year.
China Open tournament director Alfred Zhang says the vision is to create a “fifth Grand Slam of the world” in China.
“This is our hope,” Zhang said through a translator. “With our tennis development, fan base, and population, it makes sense to have it here.”