Alibaba Group Holding has announced plans to build a network of 10 billion connected devices within the next five years, as the e-commerce giant steps up efforts to explore the internet of things field.

"Our vision is to build an intelligently connected world through transformative IoT technologies," Simon Hu, senior vice-president of Alibaba Group Holding and president of Alibaba Cloud, said Wednesday at the Computing Conference Shenzhen Summit in Shenzhen.

"IoT will sit alongside e-commerce, finance, logistics and cloud (services) in its own right and command relevant focus and resources, in order to become the new strategic track for Alibaba."

The internet over the past 20 years was the internet of people, but the internet in the coming 20 years would be the IoT, Hu said.

IoT refers to a network of internet-connected physical devices that can gather, send and receive data.

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba, established its IoT business unit in April 2017, with its solutions covering household, manufacturing, smart city and automobile sectors.

It has worked with Wuxi city on building the first IoT town in Hongshan, where every "thing" in the town is connected by IoT.

It has also developed an operating system, AliOS, with 500,000 internet cars powered by the system being rolled out to the market as of today.

According to the consultancy IDC, world spending on IoT reached $736.9 billion in 2016. The figure is expected to hit almost $1.3 trillion by 2020.