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Taking stock: The business of Games
By Lei Lei (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-07-20 15:20
How do you make sure Beijing's new Olympic venues do not become embarrassing white elephants when the 2008 Games wraps up?
Answer: by exploiting them to help realize an ambitious goal of developing the largest financial center in China to rival that of China's showcase metropolis, Shanghai.
While this may sound far-fetched, economic consultant David Huang does not think so. He sees the hosting of the Beijing Games as a golden opportunity not to be squandered.
"China is such a huge country that it is necessary as well as important to make Beijing a new financial center after Shanghai and Shenzhen," said Huang, one of five senior Olympic economy consultants for the Beijing Municipal Commission of Development and Reform.
"Hosting the Olympic Games should help catalyze this. If we develop the Olympic central area into a financial hub, it will speed up the economic growth around the new Olympic zone, even the whole city, and it also takes some of the pressure off in terms of what to do with these advanced venues after the Games has wrapped up."
Huang, who took the consultant position in April 2005, is tasked with familiarizing the organizers of the Beijing Games with Olympic-related rules and regulations, while also making sure that any marketing opportunities are not squandered.
Overseeing the capital's metamorphosis from a cultural hotbed into a more multi-pronged urban center that includes a new financial heartland is clearly the most ambitious, but not the only project, he is working on.
As a specialist in Olympic marketing, Huang is well positioned to see the shortcomings of those Chinese sponsors who lack Olympic experience.
"Those Chinese companies who have become Beijing 2008 Olympic sponsors are not active enough in terms of their Olympic marketing operations. Most of them only attach great importance to launching their advertising campaigns, rather than working out long-term plans," he said. "They need to pay attention to finding ways to improve their services through Olympic marketing. To be an Olympic Games sponsor, any company should be ready for a long haul."
If the Beijing Games is viewed, somewhat cynically, as a huge PR job for modern China and emerging Chinese brands, then Huang is the salesman supreme.
"I'm working on how to promote not only Chinese brands and Chinese enterprises, but also Chinese cities and China itself through the Games," he said.
"We have to display modern China to the world from a fresh angle. We want to let the whole world know that we are now, somehow, standing at the same level with advanced countries, that we have our advantage: fast-paced growth."
With one foot in marketing and the other in economics, Huang is confident that Beijing's economy will not sag after the Games due to continued investment.
"The local economy is developing in a healthy way right now and it will peak during the Games.
"As with any other Olympic Games, there will be a partial economic wind-down, but it won't affect the overall development of Beijing's economy."
"In line with the rapid development of China's economy, more foreign enterprises will invest here from now on."
In order to devote himself to the Beijing Games, Huang left his business in the United States to his partner and now works full time in Beijing.
Although he had to take a major pay cut, he said it is worth it.
"Being able to make a contribution to China's future is more important to me than making money," he said. "I'm thrilled to be helping build the Chinese dream."
Huang, who moved to the US two decades ago, said he could not wait to come home when Beijing won the Olympic bid on July 13, 2001.
"I was so excited that I immediately emailed Liu Qi, president of the Beijing bidding committee at that time, saying I wanted to put my enthusiasm, energy and experience to good use. Unfortunately my first attempt failed," said Huang, who helped organize some of the revenue designing work during both the 1994 FIFA World Cup and the 1996 Atlanta Games.
"But I can be pretty persistent," he said.
After failing in another attempt to join the Beijing Olympic organizing committee the following year, it was a case of third time lucky for Huang.
"In 2003, a friend told me that Beijing was recruiting senior consultants for the Olympic economy. Despite my two previous lack of success, I applied for the position and was finally appointed," he said.
Huang, a sports enthusiast who played professional badminton in the 1970s, went to study sports administration in the US in 1988.
"My dream was to become a sports manager in the NBA at that time," he said.
As it turned out, his first foray into international sports after graduating would come courtesy of FIFA rather than the NBA.
"In the summer vacation of 1990, the FIFA World Cup organizing committee was recruiting interns at my university. I knew it was a precious opportunity and I refused to let it pass me by," he said.
This led to a job designing revenue streams for the US-hosted 1994 FIFA World Cup and, later, the Atlanta Olympic Games.
With all this experience under his belt, Huang thinks the Beijing Games is going to be bigger and better - a once in a lifetime opportunity that he was almost fated to seize.
"When I took that internship in the US all those years ago I had no clue that Beijing would one day be hosting the Olympics," he said. "But when I look back on it, I know I made the right choice, no, a great choice."
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