By Sam Swanson
I'm Sam Swanson, a partner in D.A. Weibring/Golf Resources Group, Inc. Since D.A. is at the SAS Championship at Raleigh, North Carolina, he asked me to fill in for him this week.
I just returned from a 10-day trip to Tokyo and Hong Kong and I'm here to report that the golf industry in all of Asia, especially China, is exploding. In Tokyo I visited with two of our clients for whom we developed golf courses in the past. One of these projects, the Byron Nelson Country Club, we did with our dear friend Byron Nelson, who unfortunately passed away last week. We'll miss him dearly. The owners of the club were very fond of Mr. Nelson's design and it was a very emotional time to visit them in light of news of Mr. Nelson's passing. Along the way I met with Mr. Duke Ishikawa a freelance writer for most of the golf magazines in Japan. Duke covers all the major golf championships in the United States. He covered for the media all of the golf courses that we have designed in Japan. Like the rest of us, Duke was trying to get a handle on where the golf industry was headed.
I also had a meeting with the very successful developers of lePetaw Golf, a course that we did in Hokkaido, which is near Sapporo. It was great to see them and to see how well they are doing. We wish them well.
I then flew to Hong Kong to attend a real estate conference that was primarily for Asian based real estate developers, architects, engineers and lenders. The conference was designed to bring everybody together to try and understand everything that was going on in the Asian market place as it pertains to major real estate projects. I was there to explore the opportunities for our company to be involved in the design and master planning of golf course projects. In addition to many of the massive developments that are going on in places like Shanghai, Beijing and Jakarta, as well as other places, there are mega resorts that are being announced almost weekly that include golf courses. As a matter of fact, there's one golf course community in Shenzhen in mainland China that includes ten golf courses that were all built virtually at the same time. That gives you an example of the magnitude of what's going on over in Asia.
The development opportunities in China, India, Taiwan, Viet Nam, and all over Asia are unbelievable compared to what is going on here in the United States. I met numerous developers, made many contacts, and did a lot of networking. Hopefully it'll come to fruition for some business opportunities in the future.
Good luck to D.A. this week at the SAS Championship and he will be back next week.
