Sports O2O: Looks good, but survival is not easy

"We can't book a venue there." The person in charge of a sports venue in Beijing told Tencent Technology directly.

In front of the stadium, there is a promotional poster for a sports O2O app. Under the large QR code is the following description: "We provide venue reservation services for major stadiums in Beijing. You can check venue availability online, place orders with one click, and pay online..." However, the venue manager told Tencent Technology: "The stadium has not opened its venues to the app. If you want to book a venue, you must come here to book directly."

This is not an uncommon scene in the current sports O2O industry. As relevant policies are introduced one after another, more and more entrepreneurs are beginning to make money in this field. However, the current problem faced by sports venue reservation O2O is the lack of offline resources, while others are facing many problems such as poor user experience, narrow audience, low frequency, and difficulty in making profits.

Sports O2O looks beautiful, but it is really not easy to survive.

A large influx of entrepreneurs

Recently, the fitness O2O company "Ran" announced that it has received a total of US$15 million in Series A financing from BlueRun Ventures Pre-A and Redpoint Investments, which is currently the largest investment in the domestic sports and fitness O2O industry. According to reports, after the financing, Ran will expand on a large scale and plans to expand to 10 cities by the end of this year. Based on 500 to 1,000 venues in each city, the number of signed venues will be between 5,000 and 1,000.

Wang Hao, the founder of Ran, had previously started a series of businesses in the e-commerce O2O field. According to him, Ran currently has a field promotion team of nearly 80 people in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou, and has integrated more than 1,500 venues.

Wang Hao told Tencent Technology that Ran’s core team came from Alibaba. Currently, there is no real leader in the sports O2O industry, and investors believe that Alibaba’s background can help this team stand out.

Just like the name "Ran", sports O2O is currently in full swing of development. At the beginning of this year, Huang Jianxiang founded Dongba to test the waters of sports O2O and obtained millions of yuan in investment. At the end of last year, "Gudong", which spans smart hardware and sports social networking, completed a US$30 million Series B financing; "Qudong", which explores the sports social market, obtained a US$10 million Series A financing, and "Dongwang" Sports also revealed that it has completed tens of millions of angel financing.

Earlier this year, Hupu Sports teamed up with Guirenniao and Jinglin Capital to establish an investment fund vertical to the sports industry with a scale of 2 billion yuan.

At present, the fund has 12 investment projects under its umbrella, covering smart hardware, sports O2O, running and online value-added services, with a total investment of more than 200 million yuan. They are the smart hardware data capture and collection company ZEPP, fitness social software platforms Chulian and Hot Fitness, running project Hupu Running, running music developer Paohaile, sports education and training projects Qingcheng Technology and Zhiqin Education, sports venue intelligent developer Smart Stadium, venue O2O Fun Sports, venue technology supplier InfoMotion, and mobile Internet sports and game product development companies Cool Play Tribe and Xianyu Games.

Huge market space

Behind the massive influx of real money and entrepreneurs is China's booming sports industry market. According to FIFA data, China's viewership during the World Cup ranked first in the world. For a country that failed to get a ticket to the World Cup, the fans' enthusiasm for the World Cup is almost obsessive, which also reflects China's vast football market and even sports market from another perspective.

The State Council issued the "Opinions on Accelerating the Development of the Sports Industry and Promoting Sports Consumption" in October last year, indicating that it will vigorously support the sports industry. At the same time, relevant government departments stated that the output value of the sports industry will reach 5 trillion yuan in 2025. In terms of football policy, the government announced on November 11 last year that it would build 20,000 football schools, and in February this year it announced that it would build 50,000 football schools. On November 27 last year, the Ministry of Education announced that it would train 6,000 football teachers in 2015.

This is a huge market space. Huang Jianxiang, the founder of Dongba, said that sports is a non-reform dividend.

But in such a huge market space, the sports industry is still a blue ocean. Data shows that currently only less than 1 trillion sports industry market has been tapped, most of which is sports equipment sales.

At the same time, China's sports consumption is still in an underdeveloped stage due to serious imbalance in resource allocation. According to data revealed by Huang Jianxiang, the current per capita sports facilities are less than 1 square meter, and the average number of physical education teachers in each primary and secondary school across the country is 0.7, which means that about two primary and secondary schools share one physical education teacher.

In the future, with the rapid development of mobile Internet technology and the completion of upstream and downstream resource integration, sports O2O will be able to directly connect demanders and suppliers, remove the middle links, and allow users to find suitable services in the shortest time and at the lowest cost, thereby maximizing the interests of both parties.

Survival is not easy

Compared with other O2O industries, the sports industry is more offline-focused, because any action online cannot be called sports, and users must "move" themselves. However, what should attract the attention of sports O2O companies is that there are many problems in the development of the domestic sports industry.

According to Wang Hao, although the domestic fitness O2O industry has entered a period of explosive growth, the industry is currently extremely unregulated. Take coaches as an example. There is no unified certification standard in the industry, and a large number of low-level coaches do not meet the requirements. Outside the fitness industry, China lacks sports resources and is a seller's market. It is not easy to integrate good venues.

The typical scene at the beginning of this article is the bigger problem that sports O2O faces: the game with venues. Although various sports venue O2O companies are deliberately promoting the fact that most domestic venues face high idle rates and low income per square meter, the reality is that there are many people who love sports, but there are very few sports venues.

Take Beijing as an example. There are more than 500 medium and large stadiums in Beijing, but most of them are sports venues for primary, secondary and high schools. They are open only on weekends. Moreover, most of them are reserved by enterprises all year round. It is difficult to book a venue without advance reservation. The emergence of sports O2O cannot attract extra customers for sports venues and bring extra income. It just takes a share of the original profits.

A general manager of a sports stadium who did not want to be named told Tencent Technology that he originally welcomed sports O2O, but he also needed to analyze other reasons: "Sports stadiums themselves are very expensive. If you want to recover the cost, you must make full use of time and facilities. From this perspective, the stadium welcomes sports O2O to help sell spare time and venues. However, if the stadium is operated at full capacity, it will cause great damage to the venue. Now many facilities in the stadium are overused and have many hidden dangers, so we have to reject the intervention of sports O2O."

Other sports O2O industries are facing the dilemma of poor user experience, narrow audience, low frequency and difficulty in making profits. A fitness coach told Tencent Technology that finding a coach conveniently and quickly is only part of the demand in the fitness industry. The level of the coach and the degree of fit between the students cannot be simply described, but sports O2O companies do not have a particularly good solution in this regard. Bai Qiang, one of the founders of the Dongba team, also admitted that sports is not a high-frequency activity.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.