E-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd was crowned China's top internet company this year, followed by Tencent Holdings Ltd and Baidu Inc, according to the 2019 list of China's Top 100 Internet Companies released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's information center and the Internet Society of China.

The 100 companies, focusing on innovation, industry convergence and industrial internet, have leapfrogged others in overall scale and become a new engine for digital economy, a report by MIIT said.

The combined internet business income of the companies reached 2.75 trillion yuan in 2018, an increase of more than 1 trillion yuan from last year's list. This accounts for 8.8 percent of China's digital economy, the report said.

Owning nearly 80,000 patents, including nearly 60,000 invention patents, the internet companies have invested 153.87 billion yuan into R&D in 2018, an increase of 45.1 percent year-on-year.

Twenty-nine big data companies, 28 cloud computing companies, 24 artificial intelligence-related companies and three internet of things-related companies are on the list.

The ranking, adopting a multidimensional comprehensive evaluation rubric, evaluates the enterprises' operational compliance and social benefit, the report said.