RESEARCH ON CHINA’S GIS INDUSTRY 
Bo Xiaoying 3 , Zhang Lingling a,b 
a School of Management, Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing (100080), China, - 
eeboxy@gmail.com 
b Chinese Academy of Sciences Research Center on Data Technology and Knowledge Economy, Beijing (100080), 
China, - zhangll@gucas.ac.cn 
SS, YF 
KEY WORDS: Geographical Information System, Industry, Industry environment, Strategies, Development, Management 
ABSTRACT: 
As an important component part of the information industry, the pillar industry in 21th’s century, GIS Industry greatly affects 
national comprehensive capability and defense safety. After the several decades’ development, China’s GIS Industry has already had 
a large scale from scratch and reached a high technological level. However, there are still many problems restricting the healthy, fast 
growth of China’s GIS industry, such as short development history, industry’s maturity and marketization at a low level, etc. In this 
paper, based on in-depth analysis of the status, characteristics and environment of China’s GIS Industry, combining with the relative 
theories of strategy management and industrial economics, the competitive strategies and development suggestion for promoting the 
healthy and rapid development of China’s GIS industry are put forward from the various angles: government, companies, customers 
etc. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
Geographic information system (GIS) is an interdisciplinary of 
Computer Science, Geography, Surveying and Mapping, 
Cartography etc. And the development and application of GIS 
technology is the most striking technology in the past few 
decades. After the introduction of GIS into China nearly 30 
years ago, the GIS technology has reached a high level and GIS 
Industry clusters with Chinese style has come into being. In the 
national Eleventh Five-Year Plan, GIS technology has been 
ranked as one of the four important issues with remote sensing, 
navigation and spatial exploration technology in Earth 
Observation and Navigation area (According to the document of 
ZBF [2002] No.l7).The future of GIS industry is very 
promising. 
With the strong support of the government, China’s GIS 
Industry is fast-growing in the scale of industry, technological 
level and rich in human resources. But compared with some 
developed countries, there are still some factors restricting the 
healthy growth of China’s GIS industry. This paper is based on 
current status and features of China’s GIS Industry environment, 
using the models and theories of strategy management and 
industrial economics to give some suggestions for the healthy 
rapid growth of China’s GIS Industry. 
2. STATUS OF CHINA’S GIS INDUSTRY 
2.1 Objects of GIS Industry 
According to the classification of an international 
authoritative information evaluation organization, the 
objects of GIS industry include hardware, software, data 
collecting and transformation, electronic data, remote 
sensing information acquisition and processing, system 
developing and integration, consulting and technology 
service. (Please see Figure 1) 
Presently, objects of China’s GIS Industry are mainly focusing 
on data production and supply, GIS software products and 
technology, GIS application and service, the end-market and 
end-user of GIS industry. 
2.2 China’s GIS Industry Chain 
At present, GIS industry chain includes mainly 4 links: data 
companies (data production and supplier) and GIS software 
providers upriver, GIS application and service companies in the 
middle reaches, the customers downriver. Considering the 
demand for the consulting and technology service in the future, 
we can see the structure of the China’s GIS industry chain as 
Figure 2. (See Figure 2) 
255