XIAMEN — On the National Sports Industry Conference held in Xiamen, Zhao Yong, deputy director of China’s General Administration of Sport, announced that China is going to hold the first-ever International Intelligent Sports Conference this year.

Zhao had high expectations for intelligent sports. “As AI is developing, intelligent sports will become an industry with the most potential. Imagine you are wearing a smart watch, it can monitor your physiological states such as body temperature and heart rate, advise you how to exercise and when to stop. It is an enormous industry, including software development, cloud platform building and intelligent services, etc.”

As the data shown on Jan 13, China’s sports industry hit a new high of 1.9 trillion yuan in 2016. Zhao believes that China should build six industry chains to achieve the ambitious 5-trillion-yuan goal by 2025, saying intelligent sports is one of the six chains, and the most innovative one.

According to Zhao, the other five industry chains are sports and leisure, competition, sports training, sports equipment manufacturing and sports lotteries.