GIS Market Is Waiting for Exploitation
Nov. 2006
Geographic Information System (GIS in short) is for the processing and analyzing of geographic conditions. Comparing to ERP, Financial software and Anti-virus software, the application scope of GIS is comparatively narrower. But in recent years, it shows a great market potential as it is applied not only in perambulation and mapping but also in resource investigation, environment assessment, regional planning, public facility management, traffic, telecom, city construction, energy, power, and agriculture etc.
At present, global market size of GIS products arrives at US$1 billion. Business revenue brought by GIS-related software, hardware and service reaches US$ 10 billion each year. In China, the application scope of GIS is expanding quickly. More sorts of applications are developed upon basic GIS data. It is pointed out that presently, sales revenue of GIS software exceeds RMB 500 million Yuan each year, while production value of GIS application projects reaches RMB 3 billion Yuan, which is more than 50 times of that of ten years ago.
The number of GIS companies (including foreign capital corporations) in China is less than 20 ten years ago and most of them are founded upon research institutes and universities. By now, there are at least 1000 GIS business related corporations in China though most of them are small and midsize enterprises with RMB 500-2000 thousand Yuan’s registered capital. About 20 percent corporations are registered with over RMB 10 million Yuan and some of them are even more than RMB 50 million Yuan. The largest GIS company by now is holding 200 employees. 25% GIS companies have 100-200 employees.
As to software market, when foreign capital corporations monopolize the majority market shares in operating system, database and office software etc., domestic GIS software possess nearly 50 percent market share. By now, we can develop large-scale platform software as well as various GIS application software products independently, and the functions and performance approaches or even exceed the international level.
China’s GIS industry is growing with 50 percent growth rate every year. In case the issues of employees, sales and brand building are well solved, the application of GIS will become a highlight in the near future.
