Hubei plans to be key center for BeiDou systems

Hubei province plans to develop an industrial center for China's BeiDou Navigation Satellite System, with size of the industry reaching up to 100 billion yuan ($14.7 billion) by 2025, local authorities said.

From 2023 to 2025, the province will improve its innovative capabilities, make breakthroughs in core technologies, create applications for BeiDou at large scale, enhance industrial chains, encourage more market entities to take part, reconstruct the industrial landscape and introduce more high-end talent, according to a three-year plan to develop the system, which was released by the Hubei Development and Reform Commission on Wednesday.

The province's size of BeiDou-related industries are expected to total 65 billion yuan by 2023, 80 billion yuan by 2024 and 100 billion yuan by 2025. By the end of 2025, Hubei aims to be contributing more than 10 percent of the size of China's BeiDou industry, it said.

The output value of core technologies and applications linked to BeiDou in Hubei — such as chips, algorithms, software, navigation data, terminal devices and infrastructure — exceeded 10 billion yuan in 2021, 7.7 percent of the country's total, according to the provincial Department of Economy and Information Technology.