The Road to Trillion-yuan Output Value of Beidou

When you go out in the morning and ride a shared bike, your phone's precise navigation will guide you around traffic jams. Open a food delivery app, and you can see the real - time location of the rider. When driving on the elevated road, a voice prompt will tell you there is construction ahead. Behind these daily occurrences, there is the same system quietly operating: Beidou.

Thousands of years ago, ancient Chinese people used the phrase "the rotation of the Big Dipper and the shifting of the stars" to describe the natural cycle brought about by the Earth's revolution and rotation. The Big Dipper was a beacon for determining directions and observing the four seasons. Thousands of years later, based on the Chinese people's "Beidou complex", the "Beidou Navigation Satellite System", one of the world's four major satellite navigation systems, was born.

During this year's Two Sessions, the achievement of "comprehensively expanding the large - scale application of Beidou" in 2025 was written into the Government Work Report. Moreover, the report also listed "accelerating the development of satellite Internet" as one of the key tasks for 2026.

At the press conference on the economic theme of the Fourth Session of the 14th National People's Congress, Zheng Shanjie, the director of the National Development and Reform Commission, said that the scale of the Beidou industry is expected to exceed 1 trillion yuan within five years.

The industrial development and large - scale application of Beidou can be traced back to 2013. At the press conference of the "White Paper on the Development of China's Satellite Navigation and Positioning Service Industry" that year, a representative of the China Satellite Navigation and Positioning Association gave 2013 two "first years" - "the first year for the standardization of the Beidou system in personal mobile phones and in - vehicle electronic devices" and "the first year of Beidou location services".

After 32 years of technological breakthroughs and 13 years of commercial exploration, Beidou has long broken free from the single label of "satellite positioning" and penetrated into the capillaries of all industries, becoming the core engine for driving the growth of the real economy and breaking through foreign technological monopolies.

Today, Beidou, with an independently controllable entire industrial chain, is fully applied in fields such as consumer, production, and urban construction. It has not only rewritten the global satellite navigation industry landscape but also opened up a trillion - yuan imagination space for China's aerospace economy.

01. From Mobile Phones to Shared Bikes, Beidou Is Right by Your Side

Many people think that Beidou is "for the country" and far from themselves. In fact, it has long entered your mobile phone, the bike you ride, and the high - speed train you take, becoming one of the unobtrusive but indispensable infrastructures in daily life.

The "White Paper on the Development of China's Satellite Navigation and Positioning Service Industry in 2025" shows that in 2024, the total output value of China's satellite navigation and positioning services reached 575.8 billion yuan, a year - on - year increase of 7.39%. By the end of the year, 288 million smartphones supported Beidou positioning. High - precision lane - level navigation covered more than 99% of urban and rural roads across the country, and intelligent connected vehicle road tests empowered by Beidou were carried out in more than 50 cities across the country.

Meituan Shared Bikes is one of the earliest domestic enterprises to actively promote the application of Beidou in the mass consumer market.

Zhang Peng, the general manager of the Meituan Cycling Industry Development Center, told "Focus One" that Beidou's precise time - space capabilities have penetrated into the entire life cycle of shared two - wheeled vehicles, including software and hardware upgrades, platform applications, and management and monitoring. It has realized real - time monitoring of vehicle riding behavior and full - process management of operation data, and also provided important data support for urban traffic planning.

These seemingly "inconspicuous" functions actually play an important role in ensuring user safety and improving operational efficiency.

For a long time in the past, the entire shared bike industry relied on multi - module chips for vehicle positioning. The cost structure was complex, and the upgrade and iteration speed was slow.

In the second half of 2023, Meituan Shared Bikes took the lead in the industry to promote the migration from multi - module positioning to "single Beidou" positioning. The company organized dozens of employees from multiple departments to debug and iterate the software and hardware systems of shared two - wheeled vehicles, and upgraded the old positioning systems to Beidou independent positioning in batches.

By the end of 2025, there were more than 10 million shared two - wheeled vehicles using Beidou independent positioning across the country, with an application coverage rate of about 70%.

Zhang Peng provided "Focus One" with several sets of data changes before and after the deployment of Beidou independent positioning:

Improved dispatching efficiency - The vehicle location is visible in real - time, and the dispatching response time is shortened by 60%;

Theft - tracking ability - The recovery rate of stolen vehicles has risen to over 99%;

Improved user experience - Accurate billing, and the complaint rate has decreased by 70%.

From the overall application situation of the industry, after loading Beidou high - precision positioning, shared two - wheeled vehicles are parked more accurately, and the road - side parking order has been greatly improved. The general public can find and use vehicles more accurately and conveniently, which has well solved common problems such as "unable to find a vehicle" and "unable to return a vehicle", and reduced the misjudgment rate of parking in restricted areas, thus greatly improving the user experience.

In addition, as the technology of Beidou's application in the mass consumer field becomes increasingly mature, the usage cost has also decreased significantly. The problems that have long troubled the shared bike industry have been solved one by one, and more and more enterprises are seeing the commercial value of Beidou.

In the field of smartphones, the application of Beidou is also becoming more and more mature.

For a long time in the past, Beidou positioning in mobile phones relied on other navigation systems to operate. Six mobile phone enterprises, including Huawei, ZTE, Honor, Xiaomi, OPPO, and vivo, jointly with upstream SoC chip manufacturers, have successively launched smartphones with Beidou independent positioning and Beidou - priority functions, breaking this embarrassing situation.

Data shows that in 2025, the shipment volume of smartphones supporting Beidou independent positioning and Beidou - priority reached 76.68 million units, accounting for 27% of the total domestic smartphone shipments, with a year - on - year growth rate of over 50%.

In addition to the explosive growth of applications in the consumer field, the value of Beidou in the production field cannot be ignored either. It has become one of the core supports for promoting the digital transformation of industries.

In the fields of agriculture, forestry, and fishery, Beidou's precision agriculture technology has helped to realize the full - process intelligence of sowing, fertilizing, and harvesting. Unmanned agricultural machinery equipped with the Beidou system has achieved less - manned and unmanned operations throughout the process. Beidou base stations cooperate with field cameras, weather stations, etc., to help realize the automatic perception, monitoring and early warning, remote diagnosis, and decision - making of farmland planting and breeding production information.

In the power field, China Southern Power Grid Company has followed the "Beidou + Power" strategy and has built a Beidou integrated operation service platform. The cumulative usage time has exceeded 200,000 hours, 665 Beidou base stations have been networked, 40 types of power Beidou application scenarios have been successfully expanded, and 178,000 sets of various Beidou terminals have been promoted and applied.

Today, the real value of Beidou is no longer limited to dozens of medium - orbit positioning satellites. It has shed its high - tech aura and penetrated into the daily lives of ordinary people and the production and operation of enterprises, forming an industrial ecosystem covering all scenarios - this is also the core confidence for it to reach a trillion - yuan output value.

02. Why Must China Have Its Own Beidou?

It is not a matter of course that Beidou has reached where it is today. 32 years ago, China almost started building its own navigation system from scratch, and the cause of this was a "network outage" in the Indian Ocean.

In July 1993, the Chinese cargo ship "Yinhe" was carrying a ship of goods to the Middle East. When the ship was sailing in the Indian Ocean, the navigation signal suddenly interrupted. The crew lost their direction and could not move forward. No matter how the crew repaired it, the signal could not be restored. Later, it was learned that it was actually GPS that had stopped the navigation signal in the area where the ship was located.

When this news was sent back to China, many aerospace scientists and national defense personnel realized the importance of independent navigation. Subsequently, Sun Jiadong, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Shen Rongjun, the deputy director of the Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense, jointly wrote a letter to the state, suggesting the launch of the Chinese Beidou Navigation Satellite System.

In December 1994, the project of the Beidou Navigation Experimental Satellite System was approved by the state, and Beidou - 1 was officially established, kicking off the "three - step" process of China's independent satellite navigation system.

The first step is to solve the problem of going from nothing to something.

Most navigation satellites are medium - orbit satellites. They are in a higher orbit than the well - known low - orbit satellites such as the GW constellation, Qianfan constellation, and SpaceX Starlink. Therefore, their communication capabilities are relatively weak, and they mainly focus on navigation functions.

Six years after the establishment of the Beidou project, Beidou - 1 initially achieved "two - satellite positioning" with two geostationary orbit satellites, making China the third country in the world to have an independent satellite navigation system after the United States and Russia.

What makes Beidou - 1 special is that it also has a short - message communication function that ordinary navigation satellites do not have. It supports users to send and receive short messages via satellites in areas without ground network coverage, and is applied in fields such as emergency rescue and deep - sea fishing.

In 2004, Beidou took the second step in its development, expanding its coverage area from China to the entire Asia - Pacific region. By launching 14 satellites, the Beidou - 2 system was built. The positioning accuracy was significantly improved compared with Beidou - 1, and the short - message communication function was further improved. It achieved a leap from "single - point positioning" to "regional networking", laying the foundation for large - scale civilian use.

In the third step, Beidou began to go global. In 2009, the Beidou - 3 project was officially launched.

To achieve global high - precision navigation, more satellites are needed for support. Soon after the establishment of the Beidou - 3 project, high - density satellite launches began. In 2018 alone, 18 Beidou - 3 satellites were launched.

At the end of 2018, Ran Chengqi, the director of the China Satellite Navigation Office and the spokesperson for the Beidou Navigation Satellite System, officially announced that the basic system of Beidou - 3 was completed and began to provide global services.

As of now, a total of 60 satellites of the three - generation Beidou series have been launched, distributed in geostationary orbit, inclined geosynchronous orbit, and medium - earth orbit, providing satellite navigation and short - message communication services for global users.

From the official establishment of the project in 1994 to the completion of the global networking of Beidou - 3 in 2020, China has taken a quarter of a century with three generations of satellites to embark on a path of independent innovation from following to paralleling and then to leading, breaking the monopoly of GPS in the global satellite navigation field and building a globally leading aerospace information network.

Alongside the development of Beidou, the output value of the satellite navigation and positioning service industry has also been increasing.

After the full completion of Beidou - 3 in 2020, industrial applications began to accelerate. In 2021, the total output value of China's satellite navigation and positioning service industry reached about 470 billion yuan, and the total social ownership of terminal products with Beidou positioning function exceeded 1 billion units.

In the same year, more than 7.8 million road transport vehicles were installed with the Beidou system, nearly 8,000 Beidou terminals of various models were promoted in the railway field, and the output value of downstream operation service links such as medical health, epidemic prevention and disinfection, remote monitoring, and online services was nearly 200 billion yuan.

By 2024, the total output value of Beidou - related industries was close to 600 billion yuan, only one step away from the trillion - yuan output value.

03. Where Is the Trillion - Yuan Output Value: New Policies, Industrial Chain, and New Scenarios

The increment of the trillion - yuan output value can be found in three directions: policy support, industrial chain support, and scenario expansion.

First of all, the support at the policy level is fully implemented from the central to the local level.

As early as July 2024, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology officially launched the pilot cultivation work for the large - scale application of Beidou in cities. In October of the same year, a list of 39 pilot cities was announced.

Since the launch of the pilot work, the 39 pilot cities have successively introduced precise policies, provided financial support, developed innovative products, and created emerging scenarios, with a cumulative promotion of more than 10 million Beidou independent positioning applications. The number of applications in fields such as mass consumption, industrial manufacturing, and integrated innovation has increased significantly.

The Xiongan New Area is a typical case. As a newly built modern three - dimensional city, after being selected as a Beidou pilot city, Xiongan has created the country's first Beidou application scenario in an "underground city".

Countless drivers have experienced getting "dizzy" in underground parking lots. In Xiongan, there is a super - large "underground city". There are about 50,000 parking spaces underground in the Rongdong area alone, with the underground spaces of 95 communities interconnected, covering an area of more than 4 million square meters.

Ordinary road navigation is mostly a two - dimensional planar navigation, only considering the four directions of east, west, south, and north. But when the navigation function is introduced into the underground scenario, it needs to be able to understand the three - dimensional space. Therefore, Xiongan has introduced Beidou signals underground with the help of the 4G and 5G passive indoor distribution systems built by telecommunications operators, realizing the in - depth integration of communication and navigation, and creating a set of integrated ground - underground basic information service systems.

The policies are accelerating the national promotion of Beidou applications, and the increasing maturity of the relevant industrial chain provides production capacity support for the application promotion.

Currently, the Beidou industrial chain has achieved independent control. The large - scale mass - production level of upstream chips and modules continues to improve, the competitiveness of mid - stream terminal equipment and system integration is constantly increasing, and the scenarios of downstream operation services are constantly enriching, forming a virtuous cycle of "sufficient upstream supply, active mid - stream innovation, and strong downstream demand".

Taking upstream chips as an example, China's Beidou chips are generally mature. The standard - precision Beidou chips mainly use the 28 - nanometer manufacturing process, which is mature and controllable, and can be designed and manufactured within the country. The market capacity is more than 200 million chips per year, and the domestic share exceeds 80%.

Looking to the future, the in - depth integration of Beidou with new technologies such as 5G, drones, intelligent driving, and artificial intelligence is giving rise to new application scenarios and business models.

The low - altitude economy represented by drones is a brand - new Beidou application scenario that has emerged in recent years. By combining the supervision work of the unique product identification code of civil drones, the industry has promoted the integration of Beidou independent positioning technology into the development process of drone production enterprises, providing guarantees for route planning and safe flight.

In 2025, the shipment volume of drones using Beidou independent positioning was about 900,000 units, accounting for 38% of the total domestic shipments. The mainstream models of leading enterprises such as DJI have been fully equipped with Beidou positioning modules.

Intelligent driving is another definite increment. There are several key technologies for vehicles to achieve intelligent driving, including positioning and navigation, environmental perception, path planning, decision - making and control, etc.