GNSS Markets and Applications - Understanding GPS: Principles and Applications - page 635

CHAPTER 12
GNSS Markets and Applications

Len Jacobson
Global Systems and Marketing, Inc.

12.1 GNSS: A Complex Market Based on Enabling Technologies

The only thing more difficult than describing the GNSS market is predicting its
future growth. Until there is a deployed GALILEO satellite constellation late in this
decade, the GNSS market will consist largely of the GPS market and its space-based
and ground-based augmentations. Even more tenuous is the market potential for
China's BeiDou and Russia's GLONASS, despite a formal agreement between the
United States and Russia to foster cooperation in their respective national satellite
navigation systems. BeiDou is just getting started as a test program, and GLONASS
has largely been ignored by the world's civil user community in favor of GPS. Thus,
these systems, along with the Japanese QZSS and the Indian GAGAN, are necessar-
ily excluded from any marketing considerations due to the uncertainty of their
schedules and viability. But if they are fielded, perhaps by the 2012-2015 time
frame, they could influence the overall market potential of GNSS beyond just GPS
and GALILEO.
Market definitions usually start by counting the sales of the goods and services
loosely associated with a technology. But how does one aggregate and quantify an
ensemble of goods such as GPS receivers that range from the $2 chips that are com-
ponents of a GPS receiver for use inside cell phones to large $300,000,
nuclear-hardened navigation sets inside a submarine? And how do you account for
all the value-added applications enabled by GPS? Are they part of the GNSS mar-
ket? A public presentation by THALES Research put the total world market for
GNSS equipment at $68 billion by 2010 [1]. At the time of this writing, the United
States enjoyed about a 50% share of the world GPS user equipment market, based
on reported sales of U.S. GPS companies, while the remaining 50% is primarily
European and Asian, split about 25% each. Canada has a small (less than 5%) mar-
ket share and is included in the U.S. total [2]. The U.S. share will likely decline as
GALILEO comes on line and more European competition enters the market.
GPS market forecasts and growth rates have varied significantly depending on
which segments or which geographic areas are included in the total. A 1991 study
predicted the total market to be $5.7 billion in 1996 [3]. That value could grow to
$68 billion by 2010, with just a 16.5% growth rate. The early forecast was signifi-
cantly wrong, as the actual total for the 1996 market was only about $2 billion, as

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