A new China Navigation Map Industry Report, 2012-2014, released by Sino Market Insight, predicts that the revenue of Chinese navigation electronic map industry will reach RMB 2.1 billion in 2014.
Started in 2002, the navigation industry in China is still in the initial stage of development compared with the international market, the report says. China’s car navigation market, PND navigation market and mobile phone navigation market are in the stage of rapid development, while the markets of LBS service, real-time traffic information service and value-added electronic map application services based on mobile communication technology are still in the initial stage of development.
From 2006 to 2011, the sales volume of car navigation in China maintained high-speed growth, with CAGR hitting 47.5%. However, the penetration rate of car navigation is still low, so China’s car navigation market still embraces huge space. Meanwhile, the growth speed of GPS mobile phone market in China is amazing, the report says. The sales volume of GPS mobile phone in China approximated 100 thousand sets in 2006, and skyrocketed to more than 50 million sets in 2011. Mobile Internet is an important development direction for the navigation map industry in future.
According to the report, the global electronic navigation map market presents distinct regional and local characteristics. Major navigation application markets around the world, such as USA, Europe, Japan and South Korea, all have many regional electronic map suppliers which have competitive advantages in diversified segments and possess stable client groups.
The navigation map market in China is led by AutoNavi and NavInfo. In particular, NavInfo is the pioneer, for it got approved to do navigation map business in the early 21st century. Joining the competition after 2006, AutoNavi captured the high-end brand automobile market quickly by virtue of advanced technologies, and penetrated into the medium-end automobile market thereafter. After 2010, the two companies launched fierce competition in the emerging mobile phone navigation market. In future, the competition in China’s car navigation and mobile phone navigation market will be fiercer, and the collision among navigation map enterprises in different sectors will be more frequent.
China Navigation Map Industry Report, 2012-2014 covers the following contents:
Current status of China navigation map industry;
Development of China navigation map market;
Market status of navigation map in major regions worldwide;
Brief introduction, financial highlight, revenue structure by segment and by region, prospects and performance prediction, clients, etc. of 15 leading navigation map enterprises in China and around the globe.
Figure 1. Distribution of the GPS+COMPASS tracking network established by the GNSS Research Center at Wuhan University and used as test network in this study.
Data from a tracking network with 12 stations in China, the Pacific region, Europe, and Africa demonstrates the capacity of Compass with a constellation comprising four geostationary Earth-orbit (GEO) satellites and five inclined geosynchronous orbit (IGSO) satellites in operation. The regional system will be completed around the end of 2012 with a constellation of five GEOs, five IGSOs, and four medium-Earth orbit (MEO) satellites. By 2020 it will be extended into a global system.
By Maorong Ge, Hongping Zhang, Xiaolin Jia, Shuli Song, and Jens Wickert
China’s satellite navigation system Compass, also known as BeiDou, has been in deveopment for more than a decade. According to the China National Space Administration, the development is scheduled in three steps: experimental system, regional system, and global system.
The experimental system was established as the BeiDou-1 system, with a constellation comprising three satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO), providing operational positioning and short-message communication. The follow-up BeiDou-2 system is planned to be built first as a regional system with a constellation of five GEO satellites, five in inclined geosynchronous orbit (IGSO), and four in medium-Earth orbit (MEO), and then to be extended to a global system consisting of five GEO, three IGSO, and 27 MEO satellites. The regional system is expected to provide operational service for China and its surroundings by the end of 2012, and the global system to be completed by the end of 2020.
The Compass system will provide two levels of services. The open service is free to civilian users with positioning accuracy of 10 meters, timing accuracy of 20 nanoseconds (ns) and velocity accuracy of 0.2 meters/second (m/s). The authorized service ensures more precise and reliable uses even in complex situations and probably includes short-message communications.
The fulfillment of the regional-system phase is approaching, and the scheduled constellation is nearly completed. Besides the standard services and the precise relative positioning, a detailed investigation on the real-time precise positioning service of the Compass regional system is certainly of great interest.
With data collected in May 2012 at a regional tracking network deployed by Wuhan University, we investigate the performance of precise orbit and clock determination, which is the base of all the precise positioning service, using Compass data only. We furthermore demonstrate the capability of Compass precise positioning service by means of precise point positioning (PPP) in post-processing and simulated real-time mode.
After a short description of the data set, we introduce the EPOS-RT software package, which is used for all the data processing. Then we explain the processing strategies for the various investigations, and finally present the results and discuss them in detail.
Tracking Data
The GNSS research center at Wuhan University is deploying its own global GNSS network for scientific purposes, focusing on the study of Compass, as there are already plenty of data on the GPS and GLONASS systems. At this point there are more than 15 stations in China and its neighboring regions.
Two weeks of tracking data from days 122 to 135 in 2012 is made available for the study by the GNSS Research Center at Wuhan University, with the permission of the Compass authorities. The tracking stations are equipped with UR240 dual-frequency receivers and UA240 antennas, which can receive both GPS and Compass signals, and are developed by the UNICORE company in China. For this study, 12 stations are employed. Among them are seven stations located in China: Chengdu (chdu), Harbin (hrbn), HongKong (hktu), Lhasa (lasa), Shanghai (sha1), Wuhan (cent) and Xi’an (xian); and five more in Singapore (sigp), Australia (peth), the United Arab Emirates (dhab), Europa (leid) and Africa (joha). Figure 1 shows the distribution of the stations, while Table 1 shows the data availability of each station during the selected test period.
Table 1. Data availability of the stations in the test network.
There were 11 satellites in operation: four GEOs (C01, C03, C04, C05), five IGSOs (C06, C07, C08, C09, C10), and two MEOs (C11, C12). During the test time, two maneuvers were detected, on satellite C01 on day 123 and on C06 on day 130. The two MEOs are not included in the processing because they were still in their test phase.
Software Packages
The EPOS-RT software was designed for both post-mission and real-time processing of observations from multi-techniques, such as GNSS and satellite laser ranging (SLR) and possibly very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI), for various applications in Earth and space sciences. It has been developed at the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ), primarily for real-time applications, and has been running operationally for several years for global PPP service and its augmentation. Recently the post-processing functions have been developed to support precise orbit determinations of GNSS and LEOs for several ongoing projects.
We have adapted the software package for Compass data for this study. As the Compass signal is very similar to those of GPS and Galileo, the adaption is straight-forward thanks to the new structure of the software package. The only difference to GPS and Galileo is that recently there are mainly GEOs and IGSOs in the Compass system, instead of only MEOs. Therefore, most of the satellites can only be tracked by a regional network; thus, the observation geometry for precise orbit determination and for positioning are rather different from current GPS and GLONASS.
Figure 2 shows the structure of the software package. It includes the following basic modules: preprocessing, orbit integration, parameter estimation and data editing, and ambiguity-fixing. We have developed a least-square estimator for post-mission data processing and a square-root information filter estimator for real-time processing.
Figure 2. Structure of the EPOS-RT software.
GPS Data Processing
To assess Compass-derived products, we need their so-called true values. The simplest way is to estimate the values using the GPS data provided by the same receivers.
First of all, PPP is employed to process GPS data using International GNSS Service (IGS) final products. PPP is carried out for the stations over the test period on a daily basis, with receiver clocks, station coordinates, and zenith tropospheric delays (ZTD) as parameters. The repeatability of the daily solutions confirms a position accuracy of better than 1 centimeter (cm), which is good enough for Compass data processing. The station clock corrections and the ZTD are also obtained as by-products.
The daily solutions are combined to get the final station coordinates. These coordinates will be fixed as ground truth in Compass precise orbit and clock determination. Compass and GPS do not usually have the same antenna phase centers, and the antenna is not yet calibrated, thus the corresponding corrections are not yet available. However, this difference could be ignored in this study, as antennas of the same type are used for all the stations.
Orbit and Clock Determination
For Compass, a three-day solution is employed for precise orbit and clock estimation, to improve the solution strength because of the weak geometry of a regional tracking network. The orbits and clocks are estimated fully independent from the GPS observations and their derived results, except the station coordinates, which are used as known values.
The estimated products are validated by checking the orbit differences of the overlapped time span between two adjacent three-day solutions. As shown in Figure 3, orbit of the last day in a three-day solution is compared with that over the middle day of the next three-day solution. The root-mean-square (RMS) deviation of the orbit difference is used as index to qualify the estimated orbit.
Figure 3. Three-day solution and orbit overlap. The last day of a three-day solution is compared with the middle day of the next three-day solution.
In each three-day solution, the observation models and parameters used in the processing are listed in Table 2, which are similar to the operational IGS data processing at GFZ except that the antenna phase center offset (PCO) and phase center variation (PCV) are set to zero for both receivers and satellites because they are not yet available.
Satellite force models are also similar to those we use for GPS and GLONASS in our routine IGS data processing and are listed in Table 2. There is also no information about the attitude control of the Compass satellites. We assume that the nominal attitude is defined the same as GPS satellite of Block IIR.
Table 2. Observation and force models and parameters used in the processing.
Satellite Orbits. Figure 4 shows the statistics of the overlapped orbit comparison for each individual satellite. The averaged RMS in along- and cross-track and radial directions and 3D-RMS as well are plotted. GEOs are on the left side, and IGSOs on the right side; the averaged RMS of the two groups are indicated as (GEO) and (IGSO) respectively. The RMS values are also listed in Table 3.
As expected, GEO satellites have much larger RMS than IGSOs. On average, GEOs have an accuracy measured by 3D-RMS of 288 cm, whereas that of IGSOs is about 21 cm.
As usual, the along-track component of the estimated orbit has poorer quality than the others in precise orbit determination; this is evident from Figure 4 and Table 3. However, the large 3D-RMS of GEOs is dominated by the along-track component, which is several tens of times larger than those of the others, whereas IGSO shows only a very slight degradation in along-track against the cross-track and radial. The major reason is that IGSO has much stronger geometry due to its significant movement with respect to the regional ground-tracking network than GEO.
Figure 4. Averaged daily RMS of all 12 three-day solutions. GEOs are on the left side and IGSOs on the right. Their averages are indicated with (GEO) and (IGSO), respectively.Table 3. RMS of overlapped orbits (unit, centimeters).
If we check the time series of the orbit differences, we notice that the large RMS in along-track direction is actually due to a constant disagreement of the two overlapped orbits. Figure 5 plots the time series of orbit differences for C05 and C06 as examples of GEO and IGSO satellites, respectively. For both satellites, the difference in along-track is almost a constant and it approaches –5 meters for C05.
Note that GEO shows a similar overlapping agreement in cross-track and radial directions as IGSO.
Figure 5. Time series of orbit differences of satellite C05 and C06 on the day 124 2012. A large constant bias is in along-track, especially for GEO C05.
Satellite Clocks. Figure 6 compares the satellite clocks derived from two adjacent three-day solutions, as was done for the satellite orbits. Satellite C10 is selected as reference for eliminating the epoch-wise systematic bias. The averaged RMS is about 0.56 ns (17 cm) and the averaged standard deviation (STD) is 0.23 ns (7 cm). Satellite C01 has a significant larger bias than any of the others, which might be correlated with its orbits.
From the orbit and clock comparison, both orbit and clock can hardly fulfill the requirement of PPP of cm-level accuracy. However, the biases in orbit and clock are usually compensatable to each other in observation modeling. Moreover, the constant along-track biases produce an almost constant bias in observation modeling because of the slightly changed geometry for GEOs. This constant bias will not affect the phase observations due to the estimation of ambiguity parameters. Its effect on ranges can be reduced by down-weighting them properly. Therefore, instead of comparing orbit and clock separately, user range accuracy should be investigated as usual. In this study, the quality of the estimated orbits and clocks is assessed by the repeatability of the station coordinates derived by PPP using those products.
Figure 6. Statistics of the overlap differences of the estimated receiver and satellite clocks. Satellite C10 is selected as the reference clock.
Precise Point Positioning
With these estimates of satellite orbits and clocks, PPP in static and kinematic mode are carried out for a user station that is not involved in the orbit and clock estimation, to demonstrate the accuracy of the Compass PPP service.
In the PPP processing, ionosphere-free phase and range are used with proper weight. Satellite orbits and clocks are fixed to the abovementioned estimates. Receiver clock is estimated epoch-wise, remaining tropospheric delay after an a priori model correction is parameterized with a random-walk process. Carrier-phase ambiguities are estimated but not fixed to integer. Station coordinates are estimated according to the positioning mode: as determined parameters for static mode or as epoch-wise independent parameters for kinematic mode.
Data from days 123 to 135 at station CHDU in Chengdu, which is not involved in the orbit and clock determination, is selected as user station in the PPP processing. The estimated station coordinates and ZTD are compared to those estimated with GPS data, respectively.
Static PPP. In the static test, PPP is performed with session length of 2 hours, 6 hours, 12 hours, and 24 hours. Figure 7 and Table 4 show the statistics of the position differences of the static solutions with various session lengths over days 123 to 125.
The accuracy of the PPP-derived positions with 2 hours data is about 5 cm, 3 cm, and 10 cm in east, north, and vertical, compared to the GPS daily solution. Accuracy improves with session lengths. If data of 6 hours or longer are involved in the processing, position accuracy is about 1 cm in east and north and 4 cm in vertical. From Table 4, the accuracy is improved to a few millimeters in horizontal and 2 cm in vertical with observations of 12 to 24 hours. The larger RMS in vertical might be caused by the different PCO and PCV of the receiver antenna for GPS and Compass, which is not yet available.
Figure 7. Position differences of static PPP solutions with session length of 2 hours, 6 hours, 12 hours, and 24 hours compared to the estimates using daily GPS data for station CHDU.Table 4. RMS of PPP position with different session length.
Kinematic PPP. Kinematic PPP is applied to the CHDU station using the same orbit and clock products as for the static positioning for days 123 to 125 in 2012.
The result of day 125 is presented here as example. The positions are estimated by means of the sequential least-squares adjustment with a very loose constraint of 1 meter to positions at two adjacent epochs. The result estimated with backward smoothing is shown in Figure 8. The differences are related to the daily Compass static solution. The bias and STD of the differences in east, north, and vertical are listed in Table 5. The bias is about 16 mm, 13 mm, and 1 mm, and the STD is 10 mm, 14 mm and 55 mm, in east, north, and vertical, respectively.
Figure 8. Position differences of the kinematic PPP and the daily static solution, and number of satellites observed.Table 5. Statistics of the position differences of the kinematic PPP in post-processing mode and the daily solution. (m)
Compass-Derived ZTD. ZTD is a very important product that can be derived from GNSS observations besides the precise orbits and clocks and positions. It plays a crucial role in meteorological study and weather forecasting.
ZTD at the CHDU station is estimated as a stochastic process with a power density of 5 mm √hour by fixing satellite orbits, clocks, and station coordinates to their precisely estimated values, as is usually done for GPS data.
The same processing procedure is also applied to the GPS data collected at the station, but with IGS final orbits and clocks. The ZTD time series derived independently from Compass and GPS observations over days 123 to 125 in 2012 and their differences are shown on Figure 9.
Figure 9. Comparison of ZTD derived independently from GPS and COMPASS observations. The offset of the two time series is about -14 mm (GPS – COMPASS) and the STD is about 5 mm.
Obviously, the disagreement is mainly caused by Compass, because GPS-derived ZTD is confirmed of a much better quality by observations from other techniques. However, this disagreement could be reduced by applying corrected PCO and PCV corrections of the receiver antennas, and of course it will be significantly improved with more satellites in operation.
Simulated Real-Time PPP Service
Global real-time PPP service promises to be a very precise positioning service system. Hence we tried to investigate the capability of a Compass real-time PPP service by implementing a simulated real-time service system and testing with the available data set.
We used estimates of a three-day solution as a basis to predict the orbits of the next 12 hours. The predicted orbits are compared with the estimated ones from the three-day solution. The statistics of the predicted orbit differences for the first 12 hours on day 125 in 2012 are shown on Figure 10.
From Figure 10, GEOs and IGSOs have very similar STDs of about 30 cm on average. Thus, the significantly large RMS, up to 6 meters for C04 and C05, implies large constant difference in this direction. The large constant shift in the along-track direction is a major problem of the current Compass precise orbit determination. Fortunately, this constant bias does not affect the positioning quality very much, because in a regional system the effects of such bias on observations are very similar.
Figure 10. RMS (left) and STD (right) of the differences between predicted and estimated orbits.
With the predicted orbit hold fixed, satellite clocks are estimated epoch-by-epoch with fixed station coordinates. The estimated clocks are compared with the clocks of the three-day solution, and they agree within 0.5 ns in STD. As the separated comparison of orbits and clocks usually does not tell the truth of the accuracy of the real-time positioning service, simulated real-time positioning using the estimated orbits and clocks is performed to reveal the capability of Compass real-time positioning service.
Figure 11 presents the position differences of the simulated real-time PPP service and the ground truth from the static daily solution. Comparing the real-time PPP result in Figure 11 and the post-processing result in Figure 8, a convergence time of about a half-hour is needed for real-time PPP to get positions of 10-cm accuracy. Afterward, the accuracy stays within ±20 cm and gets better with time. The performance is very similar to that of GPS because at least six satellites were observed and on average seven satellites are involved in the positioning. No predicted orbit for C01 is available due to its maneuver on the day before. Comparing the constellation in the study and that planned for the regional system, there are still one GEO and four MEOs to be deployed in the operational regional system. Therefore, with the full constellation, accuracy of 1 decimeter or even of cm-level is achievable for the real-time precise positioning service using Compass only.
Figure 11. Position differences of the simulated real-time PPP and the static daily PPP. The number of observed satellites is also plotted.
Summary
The three-day precise orbit and clock estimation shows an orbit accuracy, measured by overlap 3D-RMS, of better than 288 cm for GEOs and 21 cm for IGSOs, and the accuracy of satellite clocks of 0.23 ns in STD and 0.56 in RMS. The largest orbit difference occurs in along-track direction which is almost a constant shift, while differences in the others are rather small.
The static PPP shows an accuracy of about 5 cm, 3 cm, and 10 cm in east, north, and vertical with two hours observations. With six hours or longer data, accuracy can reach to 1 cm in horizontal and better than 4 cm in vertical. The post-mission kinematic PPP can provide position accuracy of 2 cm, 2 cm, and 5 cm in east, north, and vertical. The high quality of PPP results suggests that the orbit biases, especially the large constant bias in along-track, can be compensated by the estimated satellite clocks and/or absorbed by ambiguity parameters due to the almost unchanged geometry for GEOs.
The simulated real-time PPP service also confirms that real-time positioning services of accuracy at 1 decimeter-level and even cm–level is achievable with the Compass constellation of only nine satellites. The accuracy will improve with completion of the regional system.
This is a preliminary achievement, accomplished in a short time. We look forward to results from other colleagues for comparison. Further studies will be conducted to validate new strategies for improving accuracy, reliability, and availability. We are also working on the integrated processing of data from Compass and other GNSSs. We expect that more Compass data, especially real-time data, can be made available for future investigation.
UA240 OEM card made by Unicore company and used in Compass reference stations.
Acknowledgments
We thank the GNSS research center at Wuhan University and the Compass authorities for making the data available for this study.
The material in this article was first presented at the ION-GNSS 2012 conference.
Maorong Ge received his Ph.D. in geodesy at Wuhan University, China. He is now a senior scientist and head of the GNSS real-time software group at the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ Potsdam).
Hongping Zhang is an associate professor of the State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing at Wuhan University, and holds a Ph.D. in GNSS applications from Shanghai Astronomical Observatory. He designed the processing system of ionospheric modeling and prediction for the Compass system.
Xiaolin Jia is a senior engineer at Xian Research Institute of Surveying and Mapping. He received his Ph.D. from the Surveying and Mapping College of Zhengzhou Information Engineering University.
Shuli Song is an associate research fellow. She obtained her Ph.D. from the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, Chinese Academy of sciences.
Jens Wickert obtained his doctor’s degree from Karl-Franzens-University Graz in geophysics/meteorology. He is acting head of the GPS/Galileo Earth Observation section at the German Research Center for Geosciences GFZ at Potsdam.
The European Union (EU) and China will be meeting in December in Paris to discuss overlapping radio frequencies both plan to use for their future encrypted government/military satellite navigation services, according to a joint statement from both parties, reports Space News.
The December meeting will be conducted under what the Joint Statement on Space Technology Cooperation specifies as the ITU Framework. ITU is the International Telecommunication Union of Geneva, a United Nations affiliate that regulates satellite orbital slots and frequencies.
The statement was signed as an annex to a broader EU-China summit held September 20 in Brussels. As Space News reports, the two sides are continuing collaboration on satellite navigation despite the signal conflict, which has been a subject of debate for at least two years. The 27-nation EU and China have agreed to continue the China-Europe GNSS Technology Training and Cooperation Center.
China will build a testing and certification network for its Beidou satellite navigation system over the next three years to sharpen the system’s global competitiveness, according to a Friday statement from the Certification and Accreditation Administration, as reported by the Xinhua news service.
An authoritative testing and certification system with uniform standards and legal support will secure the Beidou system’s safe operation and accelerate its industrialization, said the statement. By 2015, a national testing center will be set up in Beijing, while another seven local sub-centers will be established across the nation, it said. The centers will test the safety and accuracy of products designed for use with the system and qualify them for civilian use.
China began to construct the Beidou system in 2000 with a goal of breaking its dependence on GPS by 2020. Authorities plan to launch a total of 30 satellites to complete the system. The 12th and 13th satellites will be launched at the end of April.
The Beidou system has been used by 120,000 civilian and military users to date, according to the statement.
The National Academies Press has released Global Navigation Satellite Systems, the report of a joint workshop of the National Academy of Engineering and the Chinese Academy of Engineering held in Shanghai, China, on May 24 and 25, 2011.
According to the NAP, “The workshop featured presentations chosen based on the following criteria: they must have relevant engineering/technical content or usefulness; be of mutual interest; offer the opportunity for enhancing GNSS availability, accuracy, integrity, and/or continuity; and offer the possibility of recommendations for further actions and discussions. Global Navigation Satellite Systems is an essential report for engineers, workshop attendees, policy makers, educators, and relevant government agencies.”
The 268-page report is available in both printed and electronic form. One may download either individual chapters or the complete report for personal use free of charge.
China represents a huge potential market for Western GNSS companies, even though the country has a strong and growing GNSS capability of its own. Before booking a flight to Shanghai or Beijing, however, some careful preliminary research will likely pay off: looking for potential Chinese industry partners with whom you would jointly work to open a market niche. The key ingredient — a huge investment in developing personal relationships, two-way trust, and understanding — is the only way to really penetrate the Chinese market. This month’s columns recaps some of the highlights of our recent webinar on this topic, and explores further with questions from our audience and the answers from our panel of experience China businesspeople.
Back on July 21, we held a GPS World webinar on “Doing GNSS Business in China.” The presenters were Vic Hsiao, CEO of Knowledge Access in California; Francis Yuen, CEO of Baseband Technology in Calgary, Canada; Jianhui Lee, president of BDStar in Beijing, China; and myself. The presentations were not only informative, but also generated a host of questions from a very well-informed group of GNSS-ers who logged on for the webinar. It’s therefore useful that we review what was discussed and that we try to summarize some of the key issues raised by the web audience.
Vic Hsiao has clearly spent significant time in China in his current consulting capacity, and previously with NavCom, Qualcomm, and Magellan, so he knows the dos and don’ts of trying to market in China. China represents a huge potential market for Western GNSS companies, even though there is a strong and growing GNSS capability, as Jianhui Lee explained the wide range of activities in which BDStar has become involved. Francis Yuen added a number of well illustrated commentaries around culture, communications, and negotiation which are particular to doing business in China.
In the slew of questions we received, there were a couple of common themes which I’ll try to address first. There is a really wide-felt concern about protection of intellectual property (IP) when doing business in China. While China is becoming aware of the need for IP protection, especially as its own GNSS industries create their own Beidou/COMPASS IP, and the filing of indigenous patents has grown by a whopping 57% (!), it’s still difficult to say that Chinese industry has fully grasped the concept of IP ownership and value.
So what could you do to protect your key “crown jewels” when, as a Western company, you venture into China? That question actually leads us into what would be the best way to enter the Chinese market. Showing up in Beijing with a catalogue and samples and knocking on doors is probably not the preferred approach. Before booking a flight, careful research would likely pay off looking for potential Chinese industry partners with whom you would jointly work to open a market niche. Then that leads to the key ingredient — huge investments in developing personal relationships, two-way trust, and understanding. This is the only way to really penetrate the Chinese market, through an extremely well-known and trusted partner.
And with a trusted partner, IP protection should be easier because personal relationships usually help understanding and acceptance of each other’s needs. Nevertheless, both sides need to protect their stuff as you would in a working relationship between two Western companies where trade secrets are retained and discussed only at the top level. I’ve known of instances where only object code has changed hands, and yes, object code and chips can also be cracked, which is why you need a trusted partner, as well as well established, long-term personal relationships and a business relationship which is mutually beneficial.
But don’t be fooled, China does understand IP protection very well — just ask anyone who’s still trying to get hold of the Beidou/COMPASS signal in space ICD. The Chinese government has restricted access to this key to tracking the full Beidou/COMPASS signal, and we’ve only seen Chinese companies making direct use of this ICD. Again, just another reason why you need a great Chinese industrial partner — they may be able get access to the ICD. Not that that will help you directly — you still have to work through your partner to implement Beidou signal tracking — maybe in an application embedded in the end product/receiver.
And is this all worthwhile? It’s not the easiest market to access. It’s a long way from home and the effort involved in servicing this market from the West (even with a great in-country partner) is significant. The estimated market for GNSS in China is probably around $18 Billion in 2011 and growing at a whopping 50% annual rate, so even though it takes a lot of work, the potential for a healthy return is still huge. This market will likely continue to exist for some time for Western companies, provided you’ve got the right products and have established your Chinese market baseline as we’ve outlined. But don’t wait too long — China has announced its intention to join the GNSS market on an equal footing with all the other GNSS constellation-capable nations, and that intention is not only for sovereign control of its navigation assets, it’s also to gain market share for its own industries. Import duties for GNSS products are, however, still low (around 1.5 to 5% of selling price), so it’s still possible to sell Western GNSS equipment into China. And it’s generally accepted that dual-frequency GNSS chipsets are all still imported from outside China.
Some other questions we may have not yet addressed include:
How receptive are the Chinese to women entrepreneurs? There are a lot of women in leading positions in this industry, and Vic Hsiao believes there are a large number of Chinese women entrepreneurs — so being a Western woman trying to do business in China should be a positive thing.
What is the requirement to offer integrated receivers with Beidou/Compass capability? As China is investing heavily in Beidou/Compass, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect something in the future like when Russia mandated GLONASS capability in Russia. The safe way forward is to find a Chinese partner and implement Beidou/Compass capability.
Negotiation strategies? This is perhaps the hardest thing for Western companies to get their heads around. Chinese want the best deal possible and they will likely try to wring the last cent out of any negotiated sale. This is particularly true in the commercial market where pricing is the only edge Chinese companies can get in an increasingly competitive internal market. The best strategy is to look at the longer term and work hard to stay connected to the business over many years. If you drift away from your partner, expect things to come off the rails, so remain as closely connected partners. Make a deal that is good for both sides, even though you might feel you could have done better. It’s a huge market and a few points of margin might be worth it for a long-term business presence in one of the largest, fastest growing markets in the world.
So, lots of information for people looking to make their first foray into GNSS in China — maybe not so much new news for those who are old hands, but hopefully there was the odd bit which was useful. Certainly there were a lot of questions we stirred up with our webinar. Thanks for everyone who participated; if I missed your concern, please drop me an e-mail ([email protected]) and I’ll do my best to get you some help.
When I first visited Beijing a few years ago, I came there from a stop in India. This was just before the Olympics in 2008, but there were signs then of big-scale preparations in terms of highway infrastructure and building. As the two most populous countries in the world, India (1.13 billion people) and China (1.3 billion people) both are making huge strides forward. China does appear for the moment, however, to be more focused on the commercialization of GNSS.
True, both countries are working towards their own GNSS constellations using their own launchers — China with Beidou/COMPASS and India with IRNSS — but China does appear to be ahead in this particular “space race.” While India plots a path towards IRNSS and GAGAN is up and running, Beidou Geostationary satellites are already in orbit, and western users have already reported tracking signals. With seven satellites already on orbit, Beidou/COMPASS is well on its way towards becoming first a regional and then a global satellite navigation system.
A whole heap of Chinese companies are working on GNSS in China — those who have developed low-end single-frequency, mass-market receivers and applications, and many who have imported receivers from the West and built applications around them, with lots of software applications, ancillary items such as antennas, handheld enclosures, and more. With this level of capability, it’s not surprising that indigenous multiple-frequency Beidou/GPS/GLONASS professional receivers may already be available.
I talked recently with some old friends in Beijing to catch up on Chinese GNSS and to learn more about the activities of their company — known as BDStar. Originally established in 2000, significant growth led in 2007 to an Initial Public Offering — this IPO in itself is a sign of significant economic change and growth in China. From an initial start-up staff of a few key individuals in 2000, this company has now grown to employ more than 650 people at several locations around China, working through the BDStar parent and in five subsidiary companies.
BDStar started off by importing Western survey-quality receivers and building them into survey-related applications, including high-precision vehicle tracking, geographic information systems, control, and telemetry. While port automation projects are not new, BDStar also undertook several of these as far back as 2003. It’s easy to see how Chinese companies are becoming world class when we look at the extensive skills and technical capabilities needed for these large-scale, complex projects.
BDStar took on a key project which propelled its growth when it successfully provided its first container inventory systems for a Chinese port. These containers are the large shipping boxes we see in the holds and on the decks of huge cargo ships, and sometimes flying by us on the backs of 18 wheelers. It takes enormous cranes and transporters to move them around when they leave or arrive at ports around the world. Huge dockside cranes unload containers from ships, then rubber-wheeled gantries move them from the dock to massive storage areas. These gantries acquire data when they hook up — such as where the container is coming from, where it’s going to, and when it will get its next ride — then location information is added to the container data file. When the gantry deposits the container at its temporary storage location, an RTK measurement tags the exact position at which it is stored within the vast maze of container stacks so workers can find it again later and move it onwards to its destination.
The system extends to the unloading quayside cranes, various forms of fork-lift trucks, and trailers used to transport containers about the yard. This all adds up to hundreds of radio links and radio management issues, difficult RTK receiver installations on vibrating, all-weather moving platforms — all of which need visibility of the sky and access to RTK correction signals — plus huge amounts of data acquisition and handling and display systems: a highly complex system solution that BDStar has now replicated at several ports.
Locating, tracking, and moving containers to and from their ships, in some of the largest shipping yards in the world, is no small problem. The BDStar system appears to have automated and simplified container movement for ports that include Ninbo Port Second Container Terminal, Shanghai Yangshan Container Terminals, Shenzhen Chiwan Container Terminals, Tianjin Container Terminals, and other container terminals in Shenzhen and Hong Kong. BDStar claims that the production efficiency of ports equipped with its system is improved by between 5 and 10 percent. Sure are a lot of containers at these “super-ports” in China and around the world, so improving the tracking and transit of containers through these ports can significantly improve profitability for the shipping companies.
Then, in a completely different direction, BDStar designed and implemented the ground control and monitoring command center for the early Beidou satellites. The system provides positioning, time-transfer, and short-message information for onwards distribution to Beidou users. The Beidou system not only provides positioning and timing data, but also has a “short-message” capability. BDStar has adapted this ground system so that China’s long-distance fishing fleet can be tracked and supported from mainland China. China has the largest marine fishing fleet in the world — about 280,000 vessels and a fishing industry with nearly 10 million people with the most dangerous jobs in China. It is estimated that 8,774 fishermen died and 22,345 vessels were lost while fishing between 1993 and 2004.
Vessel position data is transmitted over the Beidou short-message system, frequently from ships which are thousands of miles away from port. The BDStar system gathers this information and redistributes it to vessel operator companies on shore. The system also cross-connects the Beidou short message system with land-based cell-phone systems. Customers can respond over the Beidou short-message system; for instance, in the event that a ship is in distress, other ships in the vicinity can be routed to assist. This is currently the primary application for Beidou civilian usage, and through it BDStar has become the number one Beidou operator and terminal provider in China.
With an estimated 20m positioning accuracy, Beidou is well on its way to being a regional GNSS in 2012. By 2020 the system is planned to be global. Beidou capable receivers are clearly already being sold within China — mostly in applications using the short-message function. Unicore, a BDStar subsidiary, advertises Beidou/GPS/GLONASS receivers and chipsets developed in China.
A 2009 report estimated the GNSS market in China to be worth close to $9 billion U.S., mostly in consumer applications, and growing at around 50 percent annually! BDStar therefore has lots of local competition, and increasing competition from western GNSS suppliers aligned with other local GNSS companies. But as in most markets it’s likely that healthy, successful companies like BDStar will continue to thrive and prosper. Growth like this is good for the GNSS industry, as opportunities seem to abound for everyone in such an expanding Chinese marketplace.
