The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences. Vol. XXXVII. Part B4. Beijing 2008 
institutes send back the questionnaire, and the feedback rate is Surveyed companies and institutes is about RMB 20 billion 
about 66%. According to the result, the total output value of the Yuan(about $2.5 billion) in 2006. 
Branch Industry 
Indicator 
Method for Indicator 
GIS Industry 
Pgis 
Internet data collection; 
Analyzing the existed GIS software industry value; 
On-the-spot investigation of the main three GIS software company; 
Documentary records research; 
Survey for GIS project cost structure 
RS Industry 
PRs 
On-the-spot investigation of the main company; 
PRa 
Arithmetical operation with the existed statistics data 
PRd’ 
Arithmetical operation with the existed statistics data 
GNSS Industry 
'PGNg 
Modified the existed research data; 
comparison analysis; 
data correction; 
Expert visit; 
Surveying Industry 
PSVs 
Questionnaire survey; 
Calculated by the data of different year; 
Arithmetical operation 
Mapping Industry 
PCs 
Investigation; 
PCns 
Questionnaire survey; 
PCo 
Ignore 
Other Industry 
Po 
Ignore 
Table 2 Methods for accessing indicator of industry size 
Indicators 
Character 
2005 
2006 
PSVa+PSVr 
Aerial photography, mapping Photogrammetry and Remote 
Sensing 
0.83($0.1) 
1.2($0.15) 
PSVg 
Geographic information projects 
0.5($0.063) 
0.7($0.09) 
PSVm 
Mapping 
1.1($o.14) 
1.6($0.2) 
PSVs 
Others except 3 indicators below 
16.5($2.1) 
Table3. Calculated Results for the Indicators 
According to 2005 annual report of SBSM, the total output 
value of survey industry is 12 billion Yuan (about $1.5 billion). 
The output value of aerial photography, mapping 
Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (PSVa + PSVr) is RMB 
0.83 billion Yuan (about $104 million), accounting for 7%; the 
output value of geographic information projects (PSVg) is RMB 
0.5 billion Yuan (about $63 million), accounting for 4%; the 
output value of mapping is RMB 1.1 billion Yuan (about 
$0.14billion), accounting for 9%. Supposed that each part of 
surveying industry has the same growth rate from 2005 to 2006, 
the indicators value of 2006 are calculated out and shown in 
table 3. 
3.2 Value Access for GIS Industry Indicators 
Some organizations and experts in China studied the GIS 
software industry size and the research results are shown in 
table 3. The study investigates the production value of three key 
GIS software companies to verify the rationality of data in table 
4 by some extent. The three GIS software companies in China 
includes ESRI China (Beijing) Ltd., Beijing SuperMap GIS 
Technologies Inc. and Wuhan MAPGIS Inc., The survey result 
shows that, sales income of the three GIS software companies 
Unit: Billion Yuan(Billion Dollar) 
have reached ¥0.2 billion RMB in 2006. Thus, the output 
value of 500 million Yuan of Chinese GIS software is with a 
large degree of rationality. 
134 GIS projects from Beijing SuperMap GIS Technologies Inc. 
are selected to make sampling survey of the ratio of GIS 
software to GIS project. All these GIS projects are distributed in 
more than 16 provinces, such as Beijing, Guangdong, Shanghai, 
Zhejiang, Hebei and etc, and refers to more than 10 industries, 
such as Land Resource, Digital Cities, Transportations, Telecom, 
Pipeline, Statistics and etc. by looking up the original contract 
and make visit to Contact person, and getting the cost of GIS 
software and the cost of total project, the study finds the average 
proportion of GIS software cost in GIS projects is 25.3%(not 
including the hardware cost). Furthermore, more than 30 people 
including GIS project managers and GIS sales, all had at least 2 
year GIS work experience, are interviewed or 
questionnaire surveyed by email and telephone call. The 
purpose of the survey is to get the average proportion of the cost 
of GIS software in cost of total project (including the hardware). 
The result of survey is about 10%.