NBA looks to Asia for slam-dunk growth

When the National Basketball Association (NBA) commissioner David Stern spent a week in Beijing in 1987, he had to plead with China Central Television to broadcast NBA games - and he eventually offered to provide content free.

Now, the NBA is one of the most popular brands in China, and the only American sports league with a significant following throughout Asia. The league has a combined 70 million followers on Sina Weibo and Tencent's microblog platforms, compared with fewer than 400,000 followers for the National Football League

The new commissioner, Adam Silver, who replaced Stern last month, is hoping to build off that success, with expansion plans across Asia. In China, the basketball league is expanding TV coverage and building lavish sports facilities. In India, it is promoting the sport through after-school programmes. In South Korea, it is trading on basketball's "swag".

Silver says that NBA China, which had $150 million revenue in 2012, enjoyed growth "greater than 10 per cent" last year, and that he expects double-digit growth for the foreseeable future. While revenue in China is a small fraction of the overall business - the league generated $5.6 billion in global revenue last year - Silver says the NBA would eventually be bigger internationally than domestically, and Asia is the key factor.

"The US represents less than 5 per cent of the world's population," Silver says. "And we have, along with soccer, the most popular sport in the world.

From the outset, the NBA had to tweak its strategy for the Chinese market. Unlike in the US, there have been no bidding wars for NBA television rights in China, because CCTV is a monopoly there. Although the league and CCTV announced a multiyear deal in 2012 that offered more NBA content to Chinese homes, it is unlikely ever to be as lucrative as the league's American deal, an eight-year, $7.4 billion contract that expires in 2016.

So the NBA has largely had to rely on licensing and marketing deals. There are the digital operations, including partnerships with the Chinese Internet giants. It is building the NBA Training Centre, a $1.5 billion, 130,000-square-foot structure near Beijing set to open next year. The center will include a restaurant, merchandise store, fitness center and multiple full-size basketball courts.

"They've been making a lot of money from licensing its logo to a large variety of companies, and these products do very well because Chinese fans know the NBA is the highest level of what they do, and not many brands can say that," says Matt Beyer, who holds a government-certified sports agent license.

The league has used its experience in China as a jumping-off point to the rest of Asia. Today, NBA Asia has a staff of more than 100 across offices in Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and India.

President of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Man Jit Singh, whose Sony Six channel broadcasts NBA games, says the league had brought the game to Indians with Jr. NBA, which gives underprivileged children the opportunity to play basketball. "The Jr. NBA is in 150 schools, reaching over 200,000 children," Singh says. "NBA programmes are our highest-rated programmes behind cricket," Singh says. Levy, who oversees the Jr. NBA programme in Asia, says the league was looking to expand such efforts.

"We want more people to play basketball, because that will translate to more people following the NBA," Levy says. "We will have Jr. NBA programmes running all over Asia. We've been in the Philippines for seven years, and we're rolling out these programmes to Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia this year."

Sponsors have paid close attention to basketball's growing popularity in the region. Nike and Adidas send their biggest NBA stars on promotional tours in Asia every summer. Dunkin' Donuts hired LeBron James of the Miami Heat and Mercedes-Benz signed Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers to promote their products in Asia; and Colin Currie, managing director of Adidas Group Greater China, says the company signed the Houston Rockets guard Jeremy Lin more for his Asian marketability than for his American appeal.

@ New York Times news service