National People's Congress Representative Ding Shizhong: Implementing Innovation-driven Strategies to Promote the Transformation and Upgrading of Sporting Goods Industry

On March 5, the first session of the 13th National People's Congress was opened on March 5. Representative of the National People's Congress and Chairman of the Anta Group Board of Directors, Ding Shizhong, said in Beijing that in the future, Chinese brands will go to the international market. To become a truly “great country brand”, we must have the ability to innovate at par with the international level and realize the “affordable for consumers”. The brand "transforms and upgrades" to "brands consumers want to buy" to provide consumers with specialized, high-value, and international products.

In the past two years, China’s sports industry has entered an unprecedented period of development. Taking the ice and snow industry as an example, Beijing’s bid to host the 2022 Winter Olympics has brought the country’s “300 million people to ice and snow” and China’s ice and snow industry will reach 10,000 in 2025. Billion accounted for one-seventh of the total size of the sports industry.

Ding Shizhong believes that behind the prosperity of the sports industry, the technological innovation system of traditional industries such as sporting goods and sports shoes and apparel manufacturing is not perfect. The lack of innovative platforms and lack of innovative talents seriously plague the transformation and upgrading of the sporting goods industry. He proposes to establish a technological innovation system that focuses on companies as the mainstay, market orientation, and deep integration of industry, universities, and research institutes. Relying on industry or industry leading companies, they will organize universities, scientific research institutes, and competitive enterprises that have advantages, and adopt the principle of “corporate research and development. The "cooperation" model supports mutual exchanges and mutual appointments among universities, research institutes and enterprise talents, and develops a number of model enterprises for cooperation in production, education and research to promote the transformation and industrialization of scientific and technological achievements.

“Innovation is the driving force for the development of the sporting goods industry. Intellectual property protection is an important guarantee for promoting the prosperity of the sports industry. In practice, the protection of intellectual property rights is still insufficient.” Ding Shizhong said that a database of well-known trademarks should be established and improved, and trademark registration should be established. Actively disapproved the “free rider” registration behavior during the review process; in the aspect of design protection, the seasonality and prevalence of the design of sports shoes and clothing can refer to the EU’s “unregistered design patent system” as long as the product is on the market. Automatically obtain protection for 3 years. After 3 years, the company decides whether to apply for the registration of a registered patent for protection based on the market sales of the product.

Ding Shizhong emphasized that with the acceleration of global economic integration, resource sharing has become a market trend. Future market competition is the competition of the platform. The sporting goods industry needs a national industry innovation platform. He said that a national "sports product industry R&D and innovation service platform" should be established to devote itself to comprehensive research and resource integration related to the sports industry, attract international high-end R&D personnel, and provide technical support and public services for the sporting goods industry.

As a representative of the National People's Congress for three consecutive terms, Ding Shizhong also paid attention to social hot topics such as the healthy growth of young people in poverty-stricken areas. He said that as China's sports brand, promoting the development of China’s sports is its due responsibility; allowing children in remote and impoverished mountainous areas to enjoy the joy of sports, and improving their physical fitness through “a healthy growth program”, strengthening their strengths. Physical fitness is the mission of the Chinese sports brand.

He proposed that the government set up a special fund for "Poverty Alleviation in Sports" to incorporate the development of school physical education curriculum and sports in impoverished areas into the evaluation scope of schools and education systems, and to promote the "one-hour-a-day exercise" activity for young people in impoverished areas. Physical and intellectual support for "escaping and escorting, fundamentally eradicating the soil that breeds poverty.