Consumer China

Peak scores

  • Published 28 May 2009

Sports shoe maker Peak is winning with China's estimated 300m basketball fans.

Selling basketball shoes sounds like it might be a niche activity. Not in China. The Chinese Basketball Association estimates that the country has 300m basketball fans. Indeed, China is so basketball crazy that its youth are liable to define their generation in relation to the fateful year of 2002 – the time when the Chinese football/soccer team performed abysmally in its World Cup debut and Yao Ming, the 7ft 6in Houston Rocket star, entered the NBA in a blaze of glory. That was the year when boys (and some girls) switched en masse from playing soccer to basketball – and the sales of basketball shoes began to boom, along with almost everything else associated with the NBA. NBA TV coverage attracted more than one billion viewers on 51 stations within China last season, according to David Yang, a senior executive with NBA China.

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