Top German football club VfB Stuttgart are looking to build on their on-field success this season by tapping into the vast potential of the Chinese market.
Ties between Germany and China are in the spotlight as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz arrived in China on Sunday to begin a three-day visit at the invitation of Chinese Premier Li Qiang.
Football is big business in Germany and sporting organizations also recognize the considerable economic opportunities afforded by China's sizable market space.
Rouven Kasper, a member of the executive board and chief marketing and sales officer of VfB Stuttgart, made a trip to China last December as part of celebrations for the 60th anniversary of the Bundesliga, Germany's premier football division, which was the first European league to be broadcast on Chinese television.
While recently speaking to China Central Television (CCTV), Kasper said that Stuttgart, who are this year enjoying their best showing since winning the German Bundesliga title back in 2007, are aiming to grow the club through creating closer ties with China.
He highlighted the importance of the Chinese market, noting that the club expects to carry out cooperation across a number of sectors.
"Now it's the right time also to come to China. It's also about, not just football, also about the inter-cultural relations. It makes us stronger from an economic perspective, from a cultural, from a social perspective," said Kasper.
As one of the most popular sports in terms of participation and viewership in both Germany and China, football plays an irreplaceable role in promoting relations between the two countries.
Last month, the Chinese under-16 national football team concluded a tour of Germany which saw them undergo training sessions with professional coaches and compete in matches with several top youth clubs, including VfB Stuttgart.
In addition, multiple German clubs are also set to visit China later this year for friendly matches and other exchanges.
The China-German cooperation in football and other sports has become an important part of cultural exchanges and in deepening economic and trade ties between the two countries, and Kasper said that such collaboration is capable of going far beyond the confines of the football pitch.
"We can strengthen also the economic ties which is very relevant for both, for our partners but also for China. So there you see this eco-chain, it's not just about football and youth football which is very important. And this is something which we proactively want to bring on the table," he said.
German club VfB Stuttgart looks to score on vast China market
China's benchmark Shanghai Composite Index closed almost flat on Monday amid a wide sell-off of artificial intelligence-related stocks triggered by calls from top executives of major U.S. AI developers to slow the pace of AI development, according to Timothy Pope, an analyst for China Global Television Network (CGTN).
The Shanghai Composite Index dropped 0.07 percent to 3,885.33 points on Monday, while the Shenzhen Component Index closed 0.64 percent lower at 13,384.57 points.
The ChiNext Index, tracking China's Nasdaq-style board of growth enterprises, lost 1.10 percent to close at 3,285.58 points Monday. The STAR Composite Index, which reflects the performance of stocks on China's sci-tech innovation board, closed 0.35 percent lower at 1,811.23 points.
Pope noted that despite the overall resilience of major indexes, AI hardware stocks were among the biggest losers on the day.
"The Chinese mainland markets proved pretty resilient today actually as global AI stocks wobbled. We saw oil prices jump and interest-rate hike bets rising as well. The Shanghai Composite Index ended the session pretty much flat, while the Shenzhen Component [Index] lost a little more than half of 1 percent. AI stocks around the world sank today after the Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling for a slowdown in the development of frontier AI models. That was also backed up by OpenAI boss Sam Altman and some other industry leaders as well. But critically for Chinese companies, Amodei also called for tighter restrictions on exports of advanced AI chips and semiconductor equipment to China. We saw AI shares on the A-share have been caught in a bit of a rotation cycle already lately, with investors switching in and out pretty aggressively from these AI hardware stocks. So that added some extra momentum to today's move out of that sector. They were falling and were one of the weaker sectors today," said Pope.
The analyst said stocks of listed big state-own banks saw an injection of capitals from investors amid AI sell-off.
"Investors took some shelter in financial stocks. The big state-owned banks were once again helping to support the Shanghai index and investors were also waiting for the latest bank-lending data, although that wasn't released before the close of the markets today. There was also a small rebalance in the STAR 50 today. A handful of new companies joined the high-tech index, but that didn't fundamentally change things for the pressured tech sector," he said.
Pope highlighted that Chinese investors will witness a slew of data release in the rest of the week, helping them to have a more comprehensive grasp of the status of the country's domestic demand.
"For the week ahead in China, it's going to be very data-heavy. Tomorrow we have a big data dump including fixed-asset investment, property data, retail sales and industrial production and that's really going to give the market some clues about the state of domestic demand after those very strong trade figures that we saw last week," he said.
Chinese stocks resilient as calls for AI slowdown trigger sell-off: analyst
