Jack Ma, executive chairman of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, has called for the establishment of an electronic world trade platform whose objective would be to reduce barriers to make it easier for small and medium-sized enterprises to expand their trading capabilities worldwide.

The so-called eWTP initiative, which Ma first proposed in March, has become a hot topic as business leaders from around the world gather for the 2016 B20 Summit in Hangzhou this weekend and consider ways to spur growth.

The platform "is going to be very fundamental for the next 20 or 30 years for the world economy, and for this century", Ma said before summit.