HONG KONG RACING AND WHY IT CANNOT BE YESTERDAY ONCE MORE…

Being a Hong Kong Belonger whose home has been this city for some sixty plus years, it’s always been about trying to understand what people are thinking, who’s saying what, and why, and as the saying goes, “You can’t always get what you want, but, sometimes, you get what you need”.

To those stalwart horse racing fans, many don’t like anyone new intruding on their patch of turf and are usually singing “Those Were The Days”.

Those days are long gone.

To the Hong Kong Jockey Club in 2025, it’s about looking after its core business and attracting a totally new audience to the game known as horse racing.

But how?

It’s not about out with the old and in with the new, but about the basics of business- and relevant to the post pandemic world and rapidly changing consumer trends and thinking.

So while the HKJC might once again trumpet record new attendance and turnover numbers being set, when deep diving into the different layers of consumer reach and awareness, it’s about the number of tourists from Mainland China who were attracted to BMW Derby Day at Shatin on Sunday and how well this augurs for the future of the pastime- and more importantly, the future of Hong Kong.

To the sixty or seventy year old local racegoers, it’s really accepting that time’s up and looking at what’s the inevitable- but with positivity and something to be proud of through ownership of what is a Made In Hong Kong brand.

“Horse racing has become like Ocean Park or a HKTVB variety show for the Selfie Generation,” said one longtime local racegoer.

Maybe.

But if this works- and apparently it did at Shatin yesterday- so be it for the time being and with no one forcing anyone to do what they don’t want to do.

It’s not unlike when running the regional offices of two major global music companies with Norman Cheng and reading the tea leaves about tapping into the enormous potential of the music market in China.

Nothing is easy at first, but when we had Hong Kong’s most popular artist Jacky Cheung record his first track in Mandarin, the floodgates opened for him in the lucrative China market, with so many touring opportunities, and continues to be the land of milk and honey for other Hong Kong artists.

We also made China work as a new market for those international artists with the type of music that has that all important emotional attachment with Mainland Chinese audiences- and with room for something totally new without following trends, but creating them.

This takes extremely good A&R skills- Artists and Repertoire- not unlike a horses for courses business and marketing strategy plus having an experienced team with a deft understanding of international marketing, promotional work and global brand building.

It’s really not about trying to define what’s cutely described as “Gen X” and how this consumer group is different to Gen Y and Gen X and millennials and baby boomers.

That’s just pseudo intellectual bollocks.

It’s about understanding where the spending power is and what each age group brings to every business in a global economy currently heading south.

What’s most important for any and every business looking North are finding ways to develop new opportunities in line with the technological breakthroughs and advances happening today in China.

These are still fairly early days for the HKJC to tap into the China market with its own version of people with the necessary A&R skills to sell the entertainment value of horse racing.

It will happen through evolution, watching how the world is changing and seeing where horse racing might fit- and how and with its USP- Unique Selling Point.

With those wheels already set in motion, and under starter’s orders, there’s no time like the present to press the Go button and with a very different mindset because the consumer world is changing all the time.

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