BEIJING - China's leading position in telecommunication networks is expected to drive new digital business models worth tens of billions of US dollars, said a report by global auditing and consultancy firm Deloitte.

The report highlights the country as the world's largest base of fixed and mobile internet users, with more than 825 million people projected to be online at the start of 2019, as well as its emergence as one of the world's leading 5G markets.

"China's strengths in connectivity will likely be a key factor in enabling it to diversify from manufacturing technology to developing and executing new digital business models," said the report.

The report listed bandwidth-hungry applications such as machine vision, social credit and new retail as the new fields that can generate tens of billions of dollars annually.

Deloitte Global also predicts that revenues for semiconductors manufactured in China will grow by 25 percent to about $110 billion in 2019 from an estimated $85 billion in 2018, to meet the increasing domestic demand for chipsets driven in part by the growing commercialization of artificial intelligence.