File photo of a model of the Beidou Satellite Navigation System.Photo:Xinhua

The first International Summit focused on the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) Application kicked off on Thursday in Changsha, Central China’s Hunan Province, exhibiting the application’s success across a number of industries and mass consumption, showing the latest achievements in global application.

Chinese President Xi Jinping sent a congratulatory letter to the International Summit organizers on Thursday, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

As global digital development accelerates, spatiotemporal information, positioning and navigation services have become important new infrastructure, Xi said. 

“Since I announced the launch of BDS-3 in July last year, BDS-3 has been put into use in more than half of the world's countries and regions, and the scale applications of BDS have entered a critical stage of market-oriented, industrialized and internationalized development,” said the president.

He stressed that the BDS benefits the Chinese people as well as people around the world. China is committed to openness, integration, coordination, cooperation, inclusiveness, complementarity, and sharing of results. China is ready to work with all parties to advance the construction of the BDS, and make the BDS better serve the world and benefit mankind.

With an output value of 403.3 billion yuan ($62.7 billion), China's satellite navigation and positioning service industries including transportation, disaster relief and reduction, agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry and fisheries, according to a press briefing on September 8 held by the Hunan provincial government. 

BDS-3 system is increasingly reaching a mass market. Related products have been exported to more than 120 countries and regions, providing services to more than 100 million users in the world. It is the first space infrastructure that China has provided for global public service.

The summit, as China's first of its kind on the scale application of BDS, invited experts and scholars from all over the world in the satellite navigation field, and will strive to achieve compatibility and interoperability between BDS and other satellite navigation systems, so as to provide users around the world with higher performance, more reliable and richer services.

The BDS is one of four global navigation satellite systems worldwide, alongside the US' GPS, the EU's Galileo, and Russia's GLONASS. The BDS and GLONASS are compatible, and the BDS and GPS are compatible and interoperable, according to Xinhua.

Global Times