Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject Business economics - Controlling, grade: 1,0, Heilbronn University of Applied Sciences, course: Controlling in der Praxis, 24 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: In the last 50 years winter sport became a major economical size in mountain regions, especially in the European Alps and the Rocky Mountains. Until 1979 a lot of new ski resorts were developed. At the beginning of the 80s the politicians intervened in the wild extension in the Alps and organized the development of this natural space. The rapid expansion was finished.1 In the 80s and 90s, the enterprises began to integrate further parts of the value chain. Pure lift operators became big ski resort companies. From the beginning of the 90s the growth of winter sportsmen stagnated.2 In total there are about 32 million skiers in Europe.3 Nowadays it is nearly impossible to open new resorts. Consequently the ski resort companies are more asked to improve their services, make up combinations with other resorts, built up co- operations or downsize the companies to compete with other ski resorts in the mountains. This market is really hard battled and the suppliers try to find their niches like family-, pure sport- or snowboard resorts. They started to concentrate on their core competencies at the end of the 90s and invested huge amounts of money to upgrade the important transport possibilities like chair lifts or gondolas in the whole resorts. Most of the smaller and middle sized ski resorts work with deficit.4 This made it extremely important in the 90s for businesses to introduce new divisions in the organizational structure to control and support the management.5 Nowadays only about 50 percent of the ski resorts know Controlling as a division of the management; therefore they often invest money without knowing the affects of it.6 The increasing importance of Controlling in ski resorts is shown by the fact that PwC Switzerland has got an