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
Shanghai, a leading force for Chinese modernization, is accelerating the pace of building itself into a science and technology innovation center with global influence.
The tech-savvy metropolis is now speeding up the transition from structure building to function strengthening. Taking strengthening the capability of fostering original sci-tech innovations as the main task, it is pursuing both sci-tech innovation and institutional innovation to significantly improve its comprehensive strength in science and technology as well as the overall effects of innovations.
Over the past 10 years since Shanghai began building itself into an international science and technology innovation center, it has reaped fruitful results in sci-tech innovation, which has pushed the metropolis' GDP across the 4-trillion-yuan (about 570 billion U.S. dollars) mark.
In 2023, Shanghai's total research and development expenditure accounted for 4.4 percent of its GDP, and the city's fiscal expenditure on science and technology rose by 36.7 percent to 52.8 billion yuan (about 7.47 billion U.S. dollars).
Driven by science and technology advances, Shanghai's industrial transformation has sped up. The combined scale of the three leading industries of artificial intelligence, integrated circuits, and biomedicine in the city has reached 1.6 trillion yuan (about 226 billion U.S. dollars).
At the National Local Joint Humanoid Robot Innovation Center in Shanghai's Zhangjiang Science City, Qinglong, an open-source general-purpose humanoid robot with a height of 182 centimeters and up to 43 active degrees of freedom, is being trained to pick up oranges.
"After some training, the robot will be able to complete this move by itself when it encounters a similar scenario in the future," said Shi Zhihua, trainer of robot Qinglong.
Thanks to an advanced control software, Qinglong can skillfully perform fast walking, avoid obstacles, go uphill and downhill, and resist impact.
"We plan to build a venue that can simultaneously train 1,000 robots by 2027," Shi said.
The Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF), a third-generation medium-energy synchrotron light source facility with 46 laboratories, has been operating around the clock to serve researchers from around the country, whose experiments cover a wide range of fields such as life sciences, materials science and chemical catalysis.
"We are using the SSRF's light to observe the phase change process of this material when it's heated to 1,100 degrees Celsius," said Song Shuang, a PhD candidate of Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
"Our team is developing materials for the energy sector," said Miao Zhikai, a researcher of Tianjin University.
"We are developing cathode materials for sodium-ion batteries," said Li Guodong, a researcher of Fudan University.
Though the laboratories at the SSRF have been running at full capacity, researchers still have to apply for them months in advance, reflecting the vibrancy of innovation in Shanghai.
Shanghai blazes sci-tech frontiers to boost innovation-driven modernization
