Digital services encourage China, Italy to share Winter Olympic opportunities

As an important part of China International Fair For Trade In Services (CIFTIS), this year's World Winter Sports Expo (WWSE) came to an end on Tuesday.

Some Italian businesspeople who participated in WWSE online want to seek more opportunities in China due to the rapidly-developing digital services and the upcoming Olympic Winter Games early next year.

In their eyes, the 2022 Winter Olympics in China and the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy will deepen the friendly exchanges between the two countries while promoting development of digital services for winter sports on both sides.

The Italian Jam Session Skiing Organization was established in the 1980s. In the past decades, the coaches of Jam Session conduct technical analysis of trainees from all over the world on the scene. But due to COVID-19 pandemic, they accelerated transformation and lead students to carry out training practice online.

Valerio Malfatto, co-founder of Jam Session Ski Academy in Italy said: "From 2018 to early 2020, we came to China five times. We have held many immersion courses and advanced skiing technology courses, and have promoted a number of cooperation projects between Chinese and Italian ski resorts."

One of the projects is called 22/26, which seeks to carry out Sino-Italian youth skiing activities and cooperate in skiing equipment and tourism in China and Europe. "There are many other aspects of cooperation to jointly benefit the two countries in digital services during the pandemic," Malfatto said.

NeveItalia, founded in 2007, is a popular sports media outlet providing winter sports information along with tour guides for skiing in Italy. Its founder Angelo Bonorino noted their focus of this year will be the Olympic projects.

"Beijing 2022 will come to catch attention of the whole sector this winter season. There are many opportunities to develop together to convey the emotion of the Italian ski style and catch the opportunity to bring Chinese people to ski on the Alps and find interesting things about the Alps," he said.

Cristiano Varotti, representative of the Italian Government Tourist Board (ENIT) in China highlighted that the digital platforms in China have become a necessary investment for Italian and other international companies.

"If you want to promote your tourism destination, you absolutely need to be on the Chinese social media platforms. We've been invest a lot of resources to grow on Chinese social media platform like Weibo and TikTok with livestreaming and short videos. Livestreaming has become a very powerful way to promote the destination since the beginning of the crisis in 2020," Varotti said.

He was echoed by Gianpaolo Bruno, Director of the Beijing Office of the Italian Trade Agency.

"Digital services are important. The sector will increase at a very fast pace over the next few years. We are trying to help Italian companies in understanding this digital revolution. This is a world trend but the trend in the Chinese market is more evident. Italian companies need to have a digital marketing strategy in place in order to be successful. Digitalization is the future and we are following it," he noted.