SAIC (Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation), owner of the car brand Roewe, signed a five-year deal to be the title sponsor of the Shanghai Masters. The Roewe car seats provided for players to sit on between spells at the table have become a fixture of the tournament. In recent years, the title sponsor of the China Open has kept changing, but the choice of sponsor is always the organizer’s prerogative. “The reason our sponsor keeps changing is that too many enterprises want to cooperate with us. For us, it is a process of selection,” asserts Zhang Zhenpeng of the China Open.

He explained the three levels of sponsorship for the China Open, namely title sponsorship, platinum sponsorship and official supplier. Title sponsorship costs between RMB 8 million and 10 million, and platinum sponsorship RMB 3 to 4 million. For the 2010 China Open, Beijing Sanyuan Foods was the title sponsor; Bank of Beijing and Beijing Hyundai Motor Company were platinum sponsors.

Snooker fever has also invigorated China’s billiards industry. Currently about 60 percent of the world’s billiard products originate in China. The country’s largest manufacturer of professional billiards equipment, Beijing Xingwei Sports Goods Co., Ltd., now sells 30,000 billiard tables a year. In 2007, the company passed the technical appraisal of the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association and became an official manufacturer of snooker tables for the China Open, Shanghai Masters and other top international tournaments.