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At “Alpitec China” from February 23 to 25, 2011, supply and demand come together in the area of mountain and winter technologies. The goal of the Bolzano/Bozen Exhibition Center is not only to organize events in its own facilities, but also to bring tradeshows to where they have a market. Giants in the field from Central Europe, including companies from South Tyrol, have been active in the Chinese market for several years now. And thanks to the tireless efforts of the ambassador for skiing sports in China, Erwin Stricker, their tradeshow presence is now bearing its first fruit. Thanks to a contact made at the “Alpitec” tradeshow in Bolzano, ex-ski racer and entrepreneur Erwin Stricker had signed a contract for winter technology with the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. In order to keep the unrest under control in the area with around 30 million inhabitants and fourteen linguistic minorities, the central government decided to invest around 70 billion euros in the economic structure in coming years. Aside from the size of the country, China has geographic similarities with South Tyrol. And in the Altai Mountains of the hinterlands of Asia – from which, according to experts, Indo-Europeans brought skiing through Central Europe and into Scandinavia during their migration more than 8,000 years ago – the largest ski area in China is to be built.
After the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, some state-run ski areas were built in Northern China which were used exclusively by professional athletes for training purposes. Skiing as a sport of the masses and private ski areas have only been around in the country since 1996. Skiing sports in China attract above all young people between the ages of twenty and forty. And that is precisely the age group in the Middle Kingdom with the greatest purchasing power, as indicated by the study carried out by the market research institute McKinsey & Company. Therefore, well-to-do consumers in China are on average twenty years younger than their counterparts in the USA and Japan. For decades, the word “vacation” was a foreign word for the Chinese. Only since 1999 has the central government allowed every working person to take three established weeks of vacation per year. As a result, there is a very high concentration of vacationers, which leads to prob
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