Beidou System Starts Service in Asia-Pacific

China's domestically-produced navigation system aims to take 70 to 80 percent of the now GPS-dominated domestic market by 2020, a spokesman for the system said Thursday.

We hope industries based on the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) will hold 15 to 20 percent of the market share by 2015, according to BDS spokesman Ran Chengqi, also director of the China Satellite Navigation Office, at a press conference on the official launch of the system.

Ran announced that the BDS began providing positioning, navigation, timing and short message services to civilian users in China and surrounding areas in the Asia-Pacific region on Thursday.

Ran said the general functionality and performance of the BDS is "comparable" to the GPS system.

He further explained that the BDS open service is currently available and features positioning accuracy of 10 meters, velocity accuracy of 0.2 meters per second and one-way timing accuracy of 50 nanoseconds.

The BDS offers more conveniences for navigation system users with equipment that is compatible with multiple navigation systems, as they will no longer have to rely on a single service, said Ran.

A 2011 report said 95 percent of satellite navigation equipment in China relied on GPS services, while industrial statistics show that the total output of China's navigation service sector will top 120 billion yuan (19.2 billion U.S. dollars) in 2012.

China launched the first satellite for the BDS in 2000, and a preliminary version of the system has been used in traffic control, weather forecasting and disaster relief work on a trial basis since 2003.