Peaking in Xiamen

We were set to go to Xiamen and Quanzhou early last month to meet up with Ron Artest, the mercurial LA Laker who just won his first NBA ring, and who was signed up last year as the latest endorser for Peak’s bestselling basketball shoes in all of China. But he had to break off from his Asian tour sked all of a sudden, so our media jaunt was postponed to the last weekend of August. 

Ron was still a no-show, but the quick sojourn proved instructive and exhilarating nonetheless. Hosted and guided by Michael Chenglay and Anthony Chu who represent Peak’s Philippines distributors, All Season Sports Inc. and Cross Wings Marketing, our three-man media group, with Joel Nigos and Gianna Maniego, met with Peak Sports founder, chair and CEO Xu Jing Nan, who has built up quite a sports gear empire in only a couple of decades.

Mr. Xu recounted how soon after the Cultural Revolution, when he was still in his mid-20s, he sought to start all kinds of businesses, involving trucks and bricks, among others. But he loved basketball, and envisioned it to become a favorite sport in China. He thought of coming up with basketball shoes, well before Nike and other giant shoe pushers came around to take advantage of low labor costs in reputed sweatshops.

In 1989 Mr. Xu started manufacturing his first hoops shoes, which were then marketed under the label of Feng Deng, meaning Harvest. But its early success in the mainland made him decide to turn it into an international brand, so that by 1991, a name change occurred for the company. Mr. Xu’s international outlook had him selecting the word “Peak” for marketing abroad.  

Four years later, he expanded his footwear business to include apparel. Astute dealings with European designers and distributors had Peak marketing its first export items to Poland  followed up by contracts in Italy, France, Holland, and countries in Eastern Europe as well as the Middle East.

Today, Peak footwear and other sports gear (jerseys and shorts, t-shirts, jackets, bags, tennis shoes, running shoes, basketballs, badminton rackets, elbow and knee pads, headbands and wristbands, among others) are sold all over Europe and the Middle East.

In China, Peak has cornered 17% of the market, making it the No. 1 bestseller of basketball apparel and footwear, while it ranks No. 3 in terms of other sportswear and gear. The company maintains design studios in Beijing, Shanghai, LA and Paris, with Dutch, Italian and French designers creating myriad product editions. 

Seven teams in the current FIBA World Championships in Turkey are wearing Peak gear, among these the national teams of Lebanon and Serbia. New Zealand’s Tall Blacks and the national teams of Iran, Jordan and Cote d’Ivoire have also been sponsored by Peak.

The NBA connection began with a tie-up with the Houston Rockets, no thanks to Chinese superstar Yao Ming. Shayne Battier served as Peak’s first NBA star endorser. Others have been Jason Kidd, Dikembe Motumbo, and Sasha Vujajic. Ron Artest had been wooed as early as when he still played for the Rockets, but it was in his last season’s stint with the Lakers that he was first seen wearing Peak shoes.

He has his own exclusive Peak brand, with its design elements incorporating Ron’s specifications, inclusive of the word Queensbridge as a tribute to his New York hometown. Of course it also has the “True Warrier”’s No. 37. Artest’s shoes’ Chinese Size is 51 while Motumbo’s is 58, equivalent to Size 24 by US standards. They could be the biggest basketball shoes in the world, as they’re said to be three centimeters longer than Shaq’s.

The story goes that when Ron conducted his testing and promo tour in Quanzhou and Xiamen early last month, he made sure to affix his signature on specimen pairs of his shoes’ latest edition, as well as on T-shirts bearing his menacing visage.

Chairman Xu’s grandson, all of a rambunctious four years old, suddenly found his t-shirt being signed on the back with a Pentel pen. The boy became furious, and demanded to know why the big monster had ruined his perfectly nice shirt. The tyke all but chased Ron Artest out of the company owner’s elegant office.

It’s just that sort of anecdote that helps humanize much of the ongoing narrative on how China is relating to the rest of the world in terms of being a humongous market, as well as a fast-

developing manufacturing and industrial giant itself, with a constantly booming economy.

Peak’s early efforts at producing sports shoes involved imported parts, but now everything that goes into its factories for assembly are locally produced.

We were toured around a couple of these gargantuan sites, with factory buildings rising up to six floors, all manned by specialist assembly lines. And nowhere was there any evidence of any sweatshop. It was a Saturday, so the factory hands came to work in mufti, meaning all kinds of shirts and shorts and in slippers, with quite a number clad in various Peak t-shirts that weren’t the official weekday uniform.

The assembly lines functioned in ideal conditions, either on vast floors that had industrial fans or were air-conditioned, or if on the upper floors, with all its windows letting in the breeze that was yet augmented by electric fans.

Peak’s labor force totals 20,000 employees in China, that is, those devoted to production, as direct hires, with thousands of others in related activities. Cutters, stitchers, gluers, quality control personnel and various others are lined up in section areas for the assembly. For the apparel line, it’s mostly young women, since this factory in the Dongbao Industrial Area in Donghai, off Quanzhou in Fujian province, is quite new. And what an impressive layout it is, with long, tall buildings devoted to production, opposite similar buildings offering dormitories for as many as 3,000 stay-in employees.

This factory area occupies 11 hectares, while another closer to Shanghai takes up all of 20 hectares. A new, 30-story building is rising in an industrial site on reclaimed land off Xiamen. It will house the corporate offices and new factory levels apart from offering business office spaces for clients. 

The 55-year-old Mr. Xu says he’s very happy to have Peak sports gear introduced to Manila this September, by way of Mr. Chenglay’s efforts  which will entail distribution at Robinson’s Galeria, the Sta. Lucia Mall, and Toby’s and Olympic Village outlets.

Peak’s founder acknowledged having long admired the Philippines’ love affair with and quality of basketball, so that nowhere else in Southeast Asia does he plan to market his Peak wear than in our country.

“I Can Play” has been Peak’s basketball slogan for ten years now. It adorns each box of shoes that laves the factories. Early this year, a new edition of running shoes sold a million pairs. The Jason Kidd II edition has also been selling very well.

“If the market accepts a product quickly, we go with it very quickly,” says Mr. Xu. Not bad as a simple business philosophy that’s provided the impetus for a fast-selling international sports brand.  

 On our 90-minute drive back to Xiamen, we just had to pay a quick visit to the Rizal Park in Jinjiang City, half an hour from Quanzhou. Proudly did we note that a plaque

before the Rizal Monument  patterned after the one in Luneta  claimed Shang Guo village in Fujian province as the birthplace of our national hero’s Chinese ancestor, who became Domingo Lamco in Manila.

Chinoy moguls helped set up the immaculate large park, with Henry Sy among the biggest contributors. Another Manila connection is the high-end SM Lifestyle Center, newly opened, that faces the five-year-old and thriving SM mall in Xiamen. Both look like they were transplanted from EDSA. Of course we did some blitz SM shopping in both agoras, where Walmart’s serves as the department store.

On our last day, we took a five-minute ferry ride to Gulangyu Island, where flame trees, locally called “fong hwang su,” were still in bloom, as well as makopa trees. The 1.9-square- kilometer island used to suffer regular bombardment from Taiwan’s northernmost coast, but is now a recreational enclave for the wealthy, comprising some 6,000 residents.

On weekend, droves of Xiamen residents come over for a swim in its beaches, while tourists from all over China go through the rest of the island’s attractions, which include a garden built and donated by the Taiwanese Ling Er Cha. Above it, on a hilltop, a Xiamen native, Ku Yu Yi, built what is now known as the Piano House and Museum that shows off a collection of 600 pianos.

All that music seems to dovetail with all of China’s bells and whistles when it comes to catering to its own demands, as well as the rest of the world’s, for lifestyle choices, including the kind of sport where we can all declare that “I Can Play.”