China's satellite navigation industry growing exponentially

China's satellite navigation and location-based services industry witnessed robust growth in 2021, with the gross output reaching 469 billion yuan ($69.6 billion), a year-on-year increase of 16.29 percent, according to a white paper released Wednesday by GNSS&LBS Association of China.

It's also worth noting that the output value of high precision-related market in China surged from 1.1 billion in 2010 to 15.19 billion yuan in 2021, a compound annual growth rate of 24.5 percent.

High-precision technologies have wide applications in various areas. For example, the chips can be used in drone and robots, autonomous driving, smart construction and intelligence-connected vehicles.

As the white paper showed, the total sales volume of various high-precision application terminals registered about 1.7 million units in China by 2021.

BeiDou, China's homegrown navigation satellite system, is well known for its high-precision positioning service, with accuracy at the millimeter level for smart devices. In comparison, that of the ordinary satellite is around 10 meters.

According Qianxun SI, the operator for Beidou Foundation Reinforcement system, as of March this year, the positioning service of Beidou had been used more than 100 billion times every month, serving over 1.1 billion people across the globe, covering over 230 countries and regions.

Nowadays, the shipment of smartphones that support Qianxun high-precision positioning for driving lanes has exceeded 20 million units, with more than 10 of the latest models included, such as Huawei, Honor, Xiaomi and Vivo.