Brands and climbing gym industry insiders are preparing for 2025’s Asian Climbing Summit, a two-day event “designed to foster networking and knowledge transfer within the Asian Climbing Wall and gym market,” per asianclimbingsummit.com. The event will be held from May 15-16 at the KL Eco City Mall in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Similar in concept to the Climbing Wall Association’s annual summit in the United States, the Asian Climbing Summit will feature presentations and roundtable discussions on topics ranging from climbing holds and wall production to gym development, marketing and routesetting. Although comparable endeavors have been held previously—albeit on a much smaller scale—to spotlight the market in Asia, never before has an event embraced the entire continent’s climbing gym industry, according to the event’s organizers.
Speakers advertised for the 2025 Asian Climbing Summit include Patrick Andrey, co-founder of the Camp5 gyms in Asia and Camp5’s director of coaching and routesetting (as well as founder and managing director of Stretchmarks Asia); Niklas Wiechmann, founder of Beta Routesetting; LuYuan Cai, head coach for China’s national climbing team; Shi Hui, an IFSC routesetter; and others. Visitors (and participants) will be hailing from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, India, Bhutan, Pakistan, China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Cambodia, Vietnam, Brunei and Malaysia.
“The varying differences between the nations of Asia are one of the key elements that makes this region challenging for brands to find their market,” explained Jeremy Peet, co-founder and CEO of Camp5. “For example…Singapore has achieved per capita participation rates in climbing that are far ahead of neighboring countries. We have all witnessed the performances of Japanese climbers on the world stage. Last Olympics, many eyebrows lifted when an Indonesian climber won gold in speed climbing. And yet many countries in Asia do not have the level of infrastructure that we would find in Europe and USA. We all recognize that climbing gyms play the key role in the growth of the sport. It is our hope that the [summit] will provide a platform and networking opportunities for daring entrepreneurs to explore pioneering the untapped marketplace that Asia has to offer.”
The 2025 Asian Climbing Summit will precede the Crank Boulder Competition, a large-scale event that has proven to be extremely popular at Camp5, noted Peet. (Click here to watch a replay of last year’s final round on YouTube.) In fact, this year’s Asian Climbing Summit is an extension of pop-up booths—and the veritable marketplace hybrid competition/expo—that have organically emerged at the Crank competition in years past. This year’s summit in Kuala Lumpur is also an effort to separate those marketplace happenings from the Camp5 brand and better serve the Asian climbing gym industry at large. Such expansion—and the formalization of this summit—indicates an upward trajectory for the massive and varied climbing gym industry in Asia, the organizers reiterated.
“Asia is culturally and regionally extremely diverse, and the differences in demographics, culture, GDP, languages, political systems, import restrictions and of course climbing industry are much starker than in Europe and North America,” noted Patrick Andrey of Camp5. “The Asian Climbing Summit is an attempt to not focus on the differences but to celebrate the similarities. We are all connected through climbing, our life passion, and this summit is a call to collaborate and share our knowledge and experience with others.” Andrey added, “The [summit] is also a platform for international brands to meet the current industry players and learn more about this fast-evolving market. Asia can be enigmatic, therefore we hope that the Asian Climbing Summit can become a compass to better understand where all this is going and how everyone can find its place here.”
A full (two-day) ticket for the Asian Climbing Summit, as well as more information on the event and its planned offerings, can be found here. Jeremy Peet told CBJ there are still a few booth spaces available for interested entities, and Peet added that the event “will be an ideal platform for some of the big chain gym brands of the USA, if they’re considering going global.”
For more information about attendance or exhibiting, email info@asianclimbingsummit.com.
