There were almost 700 million Internet users in China last year, far more than in any other country, according to figures issued on Jan 22.

Of that number, 500 million people are said to use their smartphones for activities such as shopping, making payments, social networking and entertainment.

Those figures and others leave no doubt that China has become the world’s smartphone center. The country will have 733 smartphones by 2019, 47 percent of the world’s total, says the report Global Media and Entertainment 2015-2019, by PricewaterhouseCoopers. By 2019 the number of table devices in China is expected to rise to 283 million, the report says.

Smartphone Internet use is now growing three times as quickly as fixed broadband and is becoming the preference, especially among young people.

In China, consumer spending using mobiles is expected to exceed $43 billion by 2018, the report says.

“The growth in mobile Internet use is being driven by the broader demographic — both in age and economic standing,” said Marcel Fenez, president of the consultancy Fenez Media.

“Many of these are doing so to engage in the growing online retail sector, which grew more than 40 percent in 2015.”

Considering mobile Internet use in China, Fenez said, one must also take into account the increasing importance of domestic smartphone manufacturers such as Huawei.

“That’s yet another area where they are getting the right strategic, organizational and operational alignment around it right.”

Several Chinese tech firms, led by Alibaba, have become multibillion-dollar giants in recent years as the country’s online population has boomed.

In January, Nomura issued a report, China’s Internet and Media: Bucking the Trend, saying that China’s post-1990s generation will be behind continued Internet growth.

“We see this demographic as a powerful driving force for the Internet economy given that it is a generation of dot-commers that can embrace the Internet more deeply than the older generations,” Nomura said.

“(China’s young generation) has growing representation in the rapidly expanding middle class, where there is generally a greater penchant for consumption and stronger spending power.”