Yao Ming's Business Empire After Life in the NBA

Yao Ming is well regarded as one of the best players to ever grace the court in an NBA game. During the time that he played basketball, he was routinely one of the standout players in the entire league. As a matter of fact, he initially faced some criticism because he was routinely told that someone who is of Asian descent would not be able to handle themselves on the court. This was a most ridiculous claim, to begin with, and it was one that he proved wrong each and every time he got off the bench.

The Business World

As it turns out, he's just as skilled in business as he was as a basketball player, maybe even more so, if you can imagine that. Since his retirement a number of years ago, he has literally created a business empire for himself that rivals any business mogul in the world. Without a doubt, he knows what it takes to create a successful business and he knows how to keep things moving in the right direction long after that initial honeymoon period has faded away. As such, he has truly created a business empire for himself, one that he no doubt uses his status as a star NBA player to help along. Nevertheless, he has become so skilled in the business world that one has to believe that even if he had never played in the NBA, Ming would still be doing exceptionally well as a businessman and entrepreneur, something that very few people are capable of achieving at his level.

For starters, he opened a restaurant in Shanghai that has been doing exceptionally well since the day it first opened its doors. This was his first visit, one that he went in on together with other members of his family and even a few friends. Even today, all these years later, it's exceptionally successful and is widely regarded as one of the best restaurants of its type in the entire region. This is largely because he has insisted that everything be done with exceptional quality, ranging from the ingredients used to the way people are treated when they come into the restaurant. He simply won't settle for anything less and this quality shows in the overall success of the establishment.

If you think that this is the only restaurant he has, you would be mistaken. Not too long after opening the Shanghai location, he made the decision to open another similar restaurant in Houston, where he had made such a name for himself playing for the Houston Rockets. By all accounts, this is a restaurant that has proved to be immensely successful, one which is packed on an almost nightly basis. Again, it all comes back to quality and providing good service. This is exactly the same thing he uses in the business he has in Napa Valley, California, which is, as you might have already guessed, a winery. According to Ming himself, the thing that he likes best about this business is that it really doesn't have anything to do with basketball. A number of his other business ventures, even his restaurants, have some type of basketball theme running through them. In the case of the winery, it is completely devoid of anything associated with basketball and it gives him an opportunity to exercise a side of him that most people have never seen. No one is one-dimensional and having that opportunity has proven to be as beneficial to Ming as it has to those served by the winery through the exquisite products that it produces.

The Love of Basketball

Of course, Yao Ming is a man who loves basketball. Even though he clearly has more than one side to him (as does everybody else), his love of basketball is not something that has ever diminished, even in the years of his retirement. Therefore, it only makes sense that one of his business ventures involves something related not only to basketball, but other sports as well. As a matter of fact, he put up over 20 million dollars of his own money to fund an entrepreneur involved in digital marketing, allowing him to bring professional sports of all types to China. 20 million dollars is certainly no small chunk of change, so this particular investment not only required a great deal of money to get it off the ground, but also a great deal of faith on Ming’s part that it could indeed be successful.

These days, Ming sees all of this as a positive achievement in his life where he can be involved in a number of different types of businesses. Some of them are his and his alone and others our business ventures that he has gone in on with someone else. In some cases, such as the digital marketing company, it's money that he has put up for someone else to become successful. Although he certainly gets a portion of the profits, there were never any guarantees that the business would even get off the ground, much less be successful. It was something that he believed in and obviously, associated with a person he believed in just as much. Otherwise, he never would have put up that much capital to begin with.

The good news is that he's doing quite well as a businessman. This gives him the opportunity to back virtually anyone he chooses to and it allows him something that most people never really get the chance to do- he can get involved in all kinds of different businesses and explore virtually anything that interests him. That in and of itself is something that comes with its own rush of adrenaline, not to mention the immense pleasure that is undoubtedly experienced when something becomes immensely successful. It's one more way that he's making a name for himself and he's proving to the whole world, one day at a time, that he is versatile enough to succeed in virtually any arena that interests him.