About Osports

Osports

Osports is a Beijing sports photo agency owned by Osports (Beijing) Culture Media Co., Ltd. Founded in 2004, it specialises in taking, editing and selling photographs of sports events, and it built its reputation as the official or exclusive image partner of some of the biggest properties in Chinese sport. It has held that role for the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA), for Chinese Super League football clubs including Shanghai SIPG and Shandong Luneng, and for the Chinese Athletic Association, and in a single season it produced about 10,000 pictures for one CBA club. In October 2016 the company was listed on China's National Equities Exchange and Quotations, the over-the-counter market often described as the New Third Board. Alongside its core photography business, Osports has also worked in video production, official photo databases and sports visual marketing, and it set up a sports agency representing foreign players in the CBA.

Founding in 2004 and the stock market listing

Osports Media, the business behind the agency, was established on 7 July 2004. It grew up with the commercialisation of Chinese professional sport in the 2000s, when leagues such as the CBA and the Chinese Super League were developing the organised media operations — accredited photographers, official imagery and controlled licensing — that create the market for a specialist sports photo agency. Rather than selling general stock pictures, Osports positioned itself from the start as an embedded partner of leagues and clubs, shooting their competitions under official arrangements and supplying the resulting images for editorial and commercial use.

The company's standing was formalised in October 2016, when Osports was listed on the National Equities Exchange and Quotations in Beijing. Listing on that market placed the photo agency among the publicly quoted companies of China's sports industry and gave it a corporate profile unusual for a business whose product is sports photography. The listing came in the middle of the period covered by the partnerships described below, and trade reports of its club deals routinely identified Osports by that listed status.

What the agency does

The agency's documented work has three parts. The first is photography itself: Osports photographers shoot matches, training sessions and related activities for the leagues and clubs it serves, and the company takes, edits and sells the resulting sports pictures. The second is the portrait and identity work that modern leagues require — under its CBA agreement it was responsible for group portrait photographs of CBA clubs and for portraits of all CBA players after the new season opened. The third is the infrastructure around the images: official photo databases, technology support, video production and visual marketing services for its partners.

That combination distinguishes an official image partner from a pool of freelance photographers. A league such as the CBA needs a consistent visual record of every club and player, delivered to a common standard across a whole season, as well as a database from which that record can be retrieved and licensed. Osports' agreements, as reported, were structured to supply exactly that: comprehensive shooting on and off the court, an official archive, and the technical support to run it.

The first CBA years and the Visual China interlude

Basketball gave Osports its defining early partnership. According to the CBA's own account, carried by Xinhua, Osports was the official exclusive image partner of the CBA, the Women's Chinese Basketball Association and the Chinese national basketball team for five years, before another Chinese photo company, Visual China Group, signed a two-year deal with the CBA in 2015. For a sports photo agency, a five-year exclusive run with a national league, its women's counterpart and the national team represents the core of the business: season after season of fixtures, training and team activities, all flowing through one official image supplier.

The 2015 change showed that the position was contested. Visual China Group, China's largest stock image company, took the CBA role for two years, and Osports' public record in that interval rests on its club-level work rather than the league contract. The episode is a useful measure of the market Osports operates in: official image rights for China's top basketball league were valuable enough for the country's biggest picture company to compete for, and temporary enough for the original holder to win them back.

The three-year return to the CBA in 2017

In September 2017 the Chinese Basketball Association announced a new three-year deal with Osports (Beijing) Culture Media as the league's exclusive official image partner. Over the following three seasons Osports was to take photographs of CBA matches, training and activities, and it was also responsible for group portrait photos of the CBA clubs and portraits of all the CBA players after the new season opened on 21 October.

The terms underline how complete an official image partnership is. Match photography is the visible part, but the agreement also covered training and activities away from game nights and the formal portraiture by which a league presents its clubs and players. For three seasons, the CBA's official visual identity — from action pictures to the headshots used across its publications — was to be produced by one Beijing agency.

Club-by-club work in basketball

Below league level, Osports served as official image provider to individual CBA clubs, including the Beijing Ducks, Zhejiang Guangsha, the Liaoning Flying Leopards and the Shenzhen Leopards. The club deals show the volume involved. When the Shenzhen Leopards renewed their partnership with Osports Photo Agency for three years from the 2017/18 season, the club recorded that during the 2016/17 season Osports had shot and produced 10,000 pictures for the club, on and off the court. The extension kept Osports as Shenzhen's official image and photography partner, and the two sides said they would also seek further cooperation in visual communication, visual content production, sports visual marketing and business operations. Osports signed a three-year extension with Shenzhen's CBA rivals the Liaoning Flying Leopards in the same period.

Ten thousand pictures for a single club in a single season indicates the industrial scale of the work: not a photographer at a final, but a standing production line covering games, training, portraits and club activities, whose output a club then uses across its media, marketing and commercial operations.

Football: Chinese Super League clubs

Osports' second sport was football. It was the official image partner of several Chinese Super League clubs, including Changchun Yatai, Shanghai SIPG, Hebei China Fortune, Liaoning Hongyun and Shandong Luneng, known in full as Luneng Taishan. Shanghai SIPG and Shandong Luneng were among the league's biggest clubs, and the spread of the list — from Changchun in the north-east to Hebei and Shandong — shows the agency serving clubs across the country's top football division rather than in one city.

The football and basketball portfolios together cover China's two biggest professional league properties, the CBA and the Chinese Super League. In both cases Osports' role was the same official-image model: embedded photography of the club's season, supplied under a formal partnership rather than bought picture by picture.

National teams and the Infront China agreement

Osports also worked at national-team level. It partnered with Infront China, the company holding the marketing rights to China's national men's and women's basketball teams. Under the strategic cooperation Osports announced with Infront, it would help with photo shooting and video production for the two national teams, establish an official photo database for them and provide related technology support. The agreement took effect from signing and ran to 31 December 2018, and Osports held a priority right to renew it in the three months before it expired. The financial terms were not disclosed.

The Infront deal added video to the agency's documented output and made it responsible for the national teams' official photographic archive. Together with its earlier five years as image partner of the Chinese national basketball team, it gave Osports a presence at every level of Chinese basketball: the national teams, the CBA league and individual CBA clubs. In athletics, the agency likewise served as an official or exclusive image partner of the Chinese Athletic Association.

Beyond photography: the player agency

Besides its main sports photo business, Osports set up a sports agency with several foreign players in the CBA, including Shavlik Randolph of the Beijing Fly Dragons, Sonny Weems of the Zhejiang Golden Bulls and Andrew Nicholson of the Guangdong Southern Tigers. Foreign players are central figures in CBA teams, and representing them commercially was a logical extension for a company whose photographers and staff were already embedded with the league's clubs.

The agency venture shows Osports developing from a pure image supplier into a broader sports media and marketing company — the "Culture Media" of its full corporate name, Osports (Beijing) Culture Media Co., Ltd. Photography remained the foundation: the reported club agreements repeatedly describe cooperation extending from image supply into visual marketing and business operations, the areas in which a company that controls a club's official imagery can also help the club use it.

Osports in China's sports image market

Osports' record, as documented in league announcements and trade reports, is that of a specialist that won and held official positions in a market where the generalist giant also competed. It was founded in 2004, spent five years as exclusive image partner of the CBA, the women's league and the national basketball team, lost the CBA contract to Visual China Group in 2015 and regained it on a three-year exclusive deal in 2017. At club level it produced images at a rate of about 10,000 a season for one basketball club, served leading football clubs in the Chinese Super League, and built the official photo database of China's national basketball teams under its agreement with Infront China. Its listing on the National Equities Exchange and Quotations in October 2016 made those operations a matter of public corporate record, and its place in the directory of Chinese news and photo agencies rests on that combination: official access, production volume, and partnerships spanning basketball, football and athletics.