China has completed construction of its first industrial system of the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) after 27 years of work, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) announced on April 7.

The BDS, built and operated solely by China, provides all-time, all-weather and high-accuracy positioning, navigation and timing services to global users.

So far, China has 45 BeiDou satellites in orbit and the scale of its BDS industrial system had exceeded 400 billion yuan ($62.92 billion) by the end of the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-2020), according to the NDRC.

Breakthroughs in key technologies

Breakthroughs have been scored in key technologies to produce BeiDou chips and modules.

A system on a chip, known as SoC, is an integrated circuit which integrates all or most components of a computer or other electronic system. The SoC chips supporting the Beidou 3 signals have been widely used in the internet of things and consumer electronics fields.

BeiDou navigation and positioning chips, which support dual-frequency and dual-mode, have completed the verification of key performance and are now being mass produced.

By the end of 2021, the total number of terminal products with the BeiDou positioning service had exceeded one billion.

Comprehensive industrial services, applications

The BDS has provided comprehensive services to the transportation, public security, emergency management, agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry and fishery industries, with integration into electricity, finance, communications and other infrastructure.

By the end of 2021, more than 7.9 million vehicles had been equipped with the BDS. Nearly 8,000 sets of BeiDou terminals of various types had been applied in the railway sector and more than 100,000 agricultural machines had been equipped with automatic driving systems based on the BDS.

Sales of domestic smartphones equipped with the BDS service reached 324 million in 2021, accounting for 94.5 percent of the total in China.

Future global service system

In the coming years, China will further develop public service platforms for BDS application research and development, testing, certification and licensing to optimize the BDS global service system.

In addition, the country will advance the BDS's short message and other features to establish a global public emergency service platform for emergency search and rescue as well as distress alarm, providing stable services for all users at home and abroad.