How Hot Is The Public Fitness Track That PE / VC Bet Under The "National Fitness" Frenzy?

      Different from the fierceness and cruelty of competitive sports, the most public part of contemporary Chinese fitness picture is probably the daily exercise of square dance "aunts" and Park health "masters". Different from the concept of "fitness" in the gym, mass fitness is always associated with sports in a broad sense, which is a kind of physical exercise or public sport for the general purpose of enhancing physical fitness.

Online fitness is popular

Nowadays, gymnasium and treadmill have gradually become the standard configuration of modern urban life. In addition to square dance, Taijiquan and marathon in public space, fitness app that can be used at home is added to the options of civilian fitness. According to the statistics of APP Annie, a mobile data and analysis platform, compared with 2019, the consumption expenditure of health and fitness app users in 2020 will increase by 30%, and the number of APP downloads will increase by 30%. Using smart phones, fitness app reduces the threshold and cost of fitness, novices can enjoy free or paid fitness guidance at any time.

"China's per capita GDP has exceeded 10000 U.S. dollars, and the enthusiasm for public consumption, especially health consumption, is constantly rising. Therefore, I am very optimistic about the direction of general health. On this basis, fitness will certainly be a very big development direction in the future, and there is a huge space for iterative upgrading and explosive growth in this market. " Zhu Xiaohu, executive partner of Jinshajiang venture capital, told 21st century economic reporter that with the application of AI technology, people's fitness scenes will be more diversified.

According to the statistics of the 21st century economic report, the investment and financing activity of the fitness market will increase in 2020. There will be 47 financing events in the whole year, an increase of 58.62% compared with that in 2019. The total amount of fund-raising has been disclosed to reach 5.015 billion yuan. Among them, online fitness platform and intelligent fitness field are most favored by investors.

Investment and financing frequency increased

Since 2020, the public pay more attention to personal health and are willing to spend more time and money on personal fitness and health management. According to the "2020 public fitness behavior and Consumption Research Report" released by the China Sports Goods Federation, 63% of the respondents said that sports service consumption occurred in the past year, and 44% of the respondents said that their fitness consumption investment was higher than that in previous years.

Thanks to this, the activity of investment and financing in the fitness market will also be significantly improved in 2020. Nearly half of the enterprises' financing scale is about 10 million yuan, and 9 of them are more than 100 million yuan. Among them, Shuhua sports (605299), which is engaged in the production of fitness equipment, was listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in December 2020, raising 364 million yuan.

According to the 21st century economic report, more than half of the financing in the field of fitness last year was concentrated in round a and before, including 1 seed round, 6 Angel round, 7 pre-A round and 12 a round financing rounds. Although most of the financing is in the early stage, many companies have successively obtained two rounds of financing in a short period of time. For example, keep, an online fitness platform in the field of mass fitness, received $80 million in round e financing and $360 million in round f financing in May and December last year, respectively. In addition, home fitness equipment manufacturer Kim Smith obtained three rounds of financing successively in the second half of 2020, with the financing scale of more than 100 million yuan. The increase of financing frequency also indicates the capital's recognition of the company's operation mode, market position and track development prospect to a certain extent.

According to the analysis report on the prosperity index of China's sports fitness equipment market, the prosperity index in the third quarter of 2020 will reach 70.4, with a month on month growth of 21.7% and a year-on-year growth of 16.7%. This also explains the reason why goldsmith, who has developed and produced intelligent fitness software and hardware, has won three consecutive rounds of financing.

From the perspective of the advanced needs of the public, with the improvement of living standards, the general population is more willing to pay attention to their own quality of life, and are more willing to accept the concept of healthy life. According to the report "China's fitness trend in 2021" released by Shanghai Institute of physical education, 86% of the respondents are willing to spend more time and energy on Sports in the future, and 80% of the respondents will increase the consumption related to fitness activities.

From the investment field, the investment in 2020 mainly involves health food, online fitness platform, intelligent fitness, sports shoes and clothing, fitness equipment, children's training and sports rehabilitation. Health food, online fitness platform and intelligent fitness are most favored by capital, and the online fitness platform has obtained 7 investments.

"Fitness culture generally goes down from the middle and high-end, which is different from the traditional Internet playing method. Offline is more fashionable culture, and medium and high-end is a better path." Zhu Xiaohu believes that in the trend that fitness scenes will be expanded unprecedentedly, only around the intelligent hardware terminal, and aiming at the user's needs for fitness content and interaction, can we really capture users.

On October 10, 2020, the general office of the State Council issued the opinions on strengthening the construction of national fitness venues and facilities and developing mass sports, which clearly proposed to promote "Internet + fitness" and improve the level of intelligence, informatization and digitization of public service for national fitness. The introduction of favorable policies, coupled with the extension of the public's home time and other factors, has greatly promoted the "mass fitness, national fitness" market.

On the other hand, benefiting from the development of big data, artificial intelligence and other technologies, the field of intelligent fitness has gained more capital attention, focusing on intelligent management system, intelligent interaction, AI coach and other technical fields based on data acquisition, action capture and other technologies.

(this paper is the research result of the industry investment and financing of the Innovation Capital Research Institute in the 21st century.)