Beijing moves to strengthen home-grown satellite navigation

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China’s GPS rival BeiDou prepares to take off as Beijing moves to strengthen home-grown satellite navigation

• Chinese satnav industry hits US$74 billion output, has 20,000 market entities and employs nearly 1 million people: report
  
• During Vladimir Putin’s visit to China last week, Beijing and Moscow vowed to strengthen cooperation applying BeiDou and Russia’s GLONASS system
  

China’s satellite navigation market is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years amid the nation’s efforts to strengthen the footing of its home-grown BeiDou system and expand the overseas market, according to a new report.

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.

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