Five second-tier cities - Chengdu, Suzhou, Nanjing, Wuhan and Xi'an - are representative on the Chinese mainland in terms of their rapidly growing number of talents in the digital economy, according to a report released on Wednesday.

These cities showed obvious advantages in the reserve of digital talents over others in the past three years, although Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Hangzhou, which is the hometown of e-commerce behemoth Alibaba, remain the five leading cities in this area, according to the report based on user data from LinkedIn, a US-based networking website.

Digital talents in those fast-growing cities showed distinctive features, according to the report co-conducted by the Center for Internet Development and Governance under the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University and LinkedIn China.

In Suzhou, which borders Shanghai, the number of such talents in industries, such as manufacturing, medicine and architecture, with the application of digital technology is much higher than that in the basic industries of information, communications and technology.

In Chengdu, such talents also converged in consumer goods and entertainment industries, besides the manufacturing and financial sectors.

The number of such talents in Chengdu was nearly 18,500, which gave the city sixth place in the rankings of the cities. That compared to 10,000 and 8,200?- the number of such talents in Dalian and Tianjin, respectively, which came in following the top 10 cities.

Shanghai topped the rankings with 122,000 talents in the area, accounting for nearly 17 percent of the nationwide total, according to the report.