BeiDou Navigation System Transforms Multiple Industries

In recent years, the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System has been deeply integrated into emerging sectors such as the digital economy, artificial intelligence, and the burgeoning low-altitude economy. The 2025 China BeiDou Industry Development Index Report, released on November 6 at the Second China Conference on Surveying, Mapping, and Geospatial Information held in Deqing, Zhejiang Province, highlights the remarkable progress of China's BeiDou industry through an index format.

According to the report, by 2025, China's comprehensive BeiDou industry index reached 1,579 points, manifesting a year-on-year increase of 10.34 percent. Since 2020, the development index of the BeiDou industry has surged by more than 60 percent across marketization, industrialization, and internationalization. Currently, the supply chain for BeiDou's core products such as chips, modules, and antennas remains stable, with upgrades and mass production scaling to hundreds of millions.

With breakthroughs in BeiDou's high-precision positioning technology, the system has expanded its reach from traditional surveying and mapping into diverse fields including natural disaster warning, intelligent transportation, precision agriculture, energy dispatch, hydrology, and autonomous driving. These advancements have given rise to numerous unmanned and intelligent operational models.

As part of the 14th Five-Year Plan, local governments have actively embraced opportunities, implementing policies to support the large-scale deployment of BeiDou technology in strategic emerging industries like intelligent connected vehicles, artificial intelligence, and geoinformation services. This drive is fostering high-quality development in the BeiDou sector.

The report further indicates that in the first half of 2025, applications for BeiDou terminal equipment in China, exclusive of consumer electronics, have surpassed 33 million units, reflecting an increase of over 6 million units from the same period last year. The penetration rate of BeiDou's comprehensive applications stands at around 90 percent.

In 14 key industries, the number of applications for BeiDou terminal equipment has exceeded 30 million units, with a year-on-year growth rate greater than 27 percent. In the mass-consumer sector, BeiDou's application is deepening, gradually becoming a priority. Notably, in the first half of 2025, domestic smartphone shipments reached 130 million units, with over 98 percent equipped with BeiDou positioning functions.

Yu Xiancheng, president of the Global Navigation Satellite System and Location Based Services Association of China, underscored that the BeiDou system is now seamlessly integrated with emerging productive forces such as the low-altitude economy and artificial intelligence, optimizing its strengths. The synergy between BeiDou and other technologies, including satellites, the Internet, and 6G, is steering the development of a new model for spatio-temporal applications, merging communication, navigation, and remote sensing from air to ground.