BDS is designed to deliver positioning, navigation, timing and short-message services in China and the Asia-Pacific region. It aims to provide both open and authorized global navigation services worldwide by 2020 and will eventually use 35 satellites. The GPS system is run by the U.S. Defense Department and is offered free to businesses worldwide, while the EU’s Galileo system plans to charge users.

      According to Beidou Spokesman and China Satellite Navigation Office Head Ran Chengqi, the Beidou, or Compass, system is compatible with other global positioning systems and is designed to provide positioning accuracy of 10 meters, velocity accuracy of 0.2 meters per second and one-way timing accuracy of 50 nanoseconds.

      "We hope industries based on the Beidou Navigation Satellite System will hold 15 to 20 percent of the market share by 2015," Ran Chengqi told Xinhua.