China's Sports Sector Leans More Into Services

From 2018 to 2024 China's sport business grew bigger, but the way it made money changed. More of the value came from services like coaching, events, and media, while fewer dollars came from making sports gear or equipment. This shift shows how the industry is relying more on people-focused activities than on factories.

The service part of the industry's value added rose from about 65 percent in 2018 to 72 percent in 2024. At the same time the manufacturing share dropped from roughly 34 percent to 26 percent. Overall, the intensity of value added - how much value each unit of input creates - went up from 38 percent to 42 percent. These numbers come from the official sport-industry accounts released by China's statistics bureau and sports administration.

Breaking down the change, shifting the mix of outputs added about 2.5 percentage points to the service share. Improvements inside each category added another 1.44 points. A small negative interaction subtracted 0.13 points. Even when looking at different time windows or adjusting for price changes, the boost from changing the output mix stayed positive, though it was not always bigger than the internal improvements. Researchers used several tools - share of value added, intensity measures, ratio of service to manufacturing, shift-share analysis, different time frames, a price-proxy test, and crisis-recovery flags - to check the robustness of the trend.

In 2020 the co-located services - think facilities that host both training and events - fell in value added by about 16 percent, then bounced back in 2021 with a 24 percent gain, ending the period a little above the 2019 level. Education-training and media-information services did not shrink in 2020. The authors stress that the results are descriptive accounting patterns, not estimates of causality, policy impact, or pandemic mechanisms.