Cybercafes losing business to smartphones

Many seats are unoccupied recently at a cyberbar in Xi'an, Shaanxi province. Yuan Chen / for China Daily

Han Lina has been running a cybercafe for seven years, but recently she began to worry about her business.

The 36-year-old's cybercafe has 107 computers in the downtown area of Mengzhou in Henan province.

Making money was easy in the beginning, she said, when there were not so many home computers or smartphones.

"It has become more and more difficult to attract consumers. People would rather play with their smartphones," she said, adding most of her clients are young gamers.

Yuan Pengwei, who also owns a cybercafe - known as wangba in Chinese - in Xi'an, Shaanxi province, had similar feelings, and described the industry as having "entered winter".

With 900 computers running around the clock, Yuan was earning 10,000 yuan ($1,640) per day a decade ago. Now he makes half that due to lack of customers.

To save costs, Yuan sold some computers and relocated to a smaller place where the rent is lower.

"The days when people waited in line to play at cybercafes have gone," he said.

More than 300 million Chinese downloaded video games on smartphones in 2013, a sharp rise on the previous year, according to a report in December by the Game Publication Committee, a group affiliated with the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television.

Smartphones had a 13.5 percent share of the video game market, more than double the 5.4 percent of 2012, the report said.

According to the Ministry of Culture, by the end of 2012, there were 136,000 cybercafes with 11.95 million computers nationwide, about 6 percent less than in 2011.

Guan Qingbin, a 26-year-old migrant worker in Beijing, said after buying a smartphone a year ago he stopped visiting cybercafes.

"I can play games and get news on my phone," he said, adding that for several years there were not so many cybercafes in his residential community in the capital's Fengtai district.