The value of China’s satellite navigation and location-based services reached 536.2 billion yuan (US$74.2 billion) last year, an increase of 7.09 per cent on 2022, according to a white paper released by the Global Navigation Satellite System and Location Based Services Association of China (GLAC) on Saturday.
The industry, which centres on the BeiDou navigation system – China’s equivalent of the US Global Positioning System (GPS) – has covered a wide range of sectors, from chips and devices to algorithms and data. It has grown steadily in recent years from 12.7 billion yuan (US$1.7 billion) in 2006, according to the report.
With the gradual recovery of economic development, digital transformation and intelligent upgrades in various industries, the demand for satellite navigation equipment and space-time data also soared last year, the report said.
There were 20,000 market entities in the sector that had created jobs for nearly 1 million people, the report said.
“It is expected that the sector will get back to the fast track of development in coming years,” it said.
BeiDou and GPS are two of the four core providers of global satellite navigation systems, along with Russia’s Global Navigation Satellite System, or GLONASS, and the European Union’s Galileo.
The continued advance in BeiDou’s international influence would drive its overseas applications, the white paper said.
“Some domestic enterprises are vigorously expanding overseas markets, and the related revenues [are] growing significantly, reaching a year-on-year growth rate of 15 per cent.”
BeiDou is widely used in smartphones, wearable devices and other consumer products. Last year, 98 per cent of domestically produced smartphones supported BeiDou positioning functions.