The 3rd Beidou Scale Application International Summit opens

On October 24, the 3rd International Summit on the Scale Application of BeiDou was inaugurated in Zhuzhou, Hunan Province.

The summit, themed “Connecting with the World, Sharing BeiDou,” integrates the Chinese Satellite Navigation Academic Annual Conference and features 15 specialized events. It aims to establish platforms for industry leadership and policy release, international collaboration and promotion, frontier technology exchange and announcement, as well as for integrating industries and showcasing application achievements. The goal is to drive the marketization, industrialization, and internationalization of the BeiDou scale application.

The BeiDou Satellite Navigation System, developed to address national security and socio-economic development needs, is China’s independently constructed global satellite navigation system. With continuous breakthroughs in core technologies, the BeiDou system has expanded its services across various sectors, including transportation, public safety, emergency response, and agriculture. The total output value of China’s satellite navigation and location service industry reached 536.2 billion yuan (approximately $75 billion) in 2023, marking a 7.09% increase from the previous year.

Aarti Hora-Maini, Director of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, emphasized in a video address that China plays a pivotal role as a core member of the International Committee on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (ICG). She noted that the reliance on satellites and data is only expected to grow in modern society. The Office is committed to ensuring that everyone can sustainably benefit from space technology.

The time-space information services provided by the BeiDou system have become a crucial component of China’s digital economy, leading to unprecedented new opportunities for the scale application and industrial development of BeiDou.

As one of the originators of BeiDou technology, Hunan Province has made significant efforts in advancing BeiDou technical research, transforming results, fostering project collaborations, scaling applications, and clustering industries. According to official data, the total output value of Hunan’s BeiDou industry reached 45 billion yuan in 2023, with an average annual growth exceeding 25%. Currently, the province hosts 515 companies in the BeiDou industry chain and nearly 2,000 organizations engaged in satellite navigation and location services, creating a complete supply chain that covers satellite platforms and payloads, as well as BeiDou chips.