Satellite navigation, positioning services valued at 403.3 b yuan

By the end of 2020, the overall value of satellite-enabled navigation and positioning services in China was 403.3 billion yuan ($62.8 billion), with a 16.9-percent increase year-on-year, according to a white paper published on Tuesday in Beijing.

The 2021 White Paper on the Development of China's Satellite Navigation and Positioning Industries, compiled by the Global Navigation Satellite System and Location-Based Services Association of China, said chips, equipment, software, data and infrastructure businesses saw an 11-percent increase compared with 2019.

The growth in the satellite navigation and positioning businesses was a result of several factors, such as the rapid recovery in the nation's manufacturing sectors and public consumption after the effective control of COVID-19, the start of the Beidou Navigation Satellite System's full-scale global service, and the government's efforts in building new public infrastructure, according to the document.

Moreover, a lot of domestic enterprises have begun to take advantage of the Beidou system to boost their operations, generating rising demands in Beidou-based products and services, it notes.

More than 500,000 Chinese people now work at about 14,000 domestic institutes and companies doing business related to Beidou and other satellite navigation and positioning services, the white paper said.

The white paper also notes that Beidou is being used in dozens of businesses and public service sectors in China and foreign countries, such as transportation, electric power, fisheries, mining, agriculture and real-estate construction.

Beidou is the country's largest space-based system and one of four global navigation networks, along with the United States' GPS, Russia's GLONASS and the European Union's Galileo.

In June 2020, the final satellite to complete Beidou's third-generation network was lifted by a Long March 3B carrier rocket at the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Southwest China's Sichuan province and was placed into a geostationary orbit about 36,000 kilometers above the Earth.

The next month, President Xi Jinping announced that the system had been completed and started providing full-scale global services.

Since 2000, a total of 59 Beidou satellites, including the first four experimental ones, have been launched from Xichang on 44 Long March 3-series rockets, with some of them having been retired.