Private computer coding classes have been gaining in popularity in China with computers integral to almost every industry.
Fair Computer Club, a computer tutoring center in Shanghai, provides 16 courses for children under 19 years old. All courses charge 200 yuan (about 29 U.S. dollars) per hour. Nie Wei, founder of Fair Computer Club said that student numbers grow 50 to 60 percent each year, and the school is now raking in around four million yuan a year.
"We invested two million yuan for the first school in 2018, and then another one million yuan for the second. It took us around one year to make that back, and so we started to make profits by the second year," said Wei.
Despite traditional offline tutoring centers, online education service providers are also taking a big slice of the pie. According to internet search giant Baidu, search figures for children's programming online courses rose 18 percent in June compared to the same period last year.
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U.S.-listed IT education service provider Tedu.com, for example, enrolled about 11,400 students on its online children's programming teaching platform during the first half of the year. That was a jump of nearly 360 percent compared to the same period last year. That's while online class provider, iandCode.com, completed its A round funding, making it worth several million U.S. dollars.
Experts attributed the increase of online education service to the changing demand of the parents.
"When the kids are six years old, the parents might want an offline or a hybrid model. But once they reach ten or twelve years old, a lot of his or her time is occupied by tutoring. If you a traditional offline player, you don't have any online hybrid models, you're gonna lose this client," said Claudia Wang from Oliver Wyman, a leading international management consulting firm.
Data from consulting firm Intelligent Research Group shows that the market value of China's children's programming education is more than 10 billion yuan. But the penetration rate is just less than one percent, which means that every one percent increase in the penetration rate will expand the market's value by 10 billion yuan.