HANGZHOU: A report from Accenture and AliResearch, the Alibaba Group's research arm, says the global cross-border e-commerce market will be worth US$1 trillion by 2020.

According to their joint research, the market is expected to produce compound annual growth of 27.4 percent over the next five years and by 2020 more than 900 million people worldwide will account for nearly 30 percent of all global B2C transactions.

China is expected to become the largest cross-border B2C market by 2020 with over 200 million of the country's middle class consumers purchasing US$245 billion worth of goods per annum.

E-commerce is expected to make up 24.2 percent of total Chinese consumption by 2020, up from an estimated 9.9 percent in 2014.

The country has the world's largest mobile Internet population with 527 million users and nearly half of its total online shopping GMV (gross merchandise volume) was generated by consumers using mobile devices in the first quarter of 2015.

Alibaba Group produced US$394 billion in GMV for the 12 months to March 2015 by hosting 10 million Chinese small businesses that sell on the company's online marketplaces.

Speaking in the U.S. on June 09, founder and executive chairman Jack Ma (left) said he wanted to add another 10 million SMEs to Alibaba by positioning it as a sales channel for U.S. companies that want to reach China's middle class - expected to number 630 million by 2022.

"Alibaba's strategy in the United States is clear," explained Jennifer Kuperman, Alibaba Group vice president of international corporate affairs: "We want to help as many U.S. entrepreneurs, small businesses, and companies of all sizes sell their goods to a growing Chinese consumer class."

Alibaba currently produces two percent of its revenue from outside China. Ma said he wants to increase this to 40 percent and surpass WalMart by selling US$1 trillion of goods through his e-commerce platforms by 2020.