Advancing the World from China

SuperMap GIS Technologies Inc is a fast-growing geospatial company headquartered in Beijing, China. Our basic product is integrated GIS software for building complete GIS solutions and our customers are public and private-sector professionals active in such diverse fields as land-use and city planning, transportation, utilities, military and defence, dispatching and navigation.

SuperMap GIS Technologies was established in June 1997 by research students at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, which supported founding of the company. The initial mission was to commercialise GIS research results aimed at improving the global socio-economic environment. Present customers are based in China, Japan and some other major Asian regions such as Korea and Kazakhstan, but the aim is over the coming decade to become one of the top five GIS companies in the world.

Decade of Growth
Based on growth figures over the last three years, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu listed us for the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 2005 Award. With this nomination the US accountant acknowledges that we belong to the five hundred fastest growing IT companies in the Asia Pacific region. SuperMap GIS Technologies was the only geospatial firm in the ranking and we do indeed grow exceptionally fast. Having started out in 1997 with US$60,000 and fewer than ten staff members, by 2003 we had more than a hundred personnel and today we employ about two hundred professionals. These are active in R&D, consultancy, sales, marketing and administration; nearly 140 have a background in IT and GIS and about seventy work in our branch offices and subsidiaries in Beijing, HangZhou, Hong Kong and Tokyo. We have set up partnerships with more than four hundred IT companies and System Integrators (SI). Our annual revenue (2005 figures) is over 10 million US dollars, an increase of 69% in just one year, and our profits have increased by 52%.

Basic Activities
Right from the start, SuperMap invested heavily in R&D to create a desktop platform for geospatial information development and application, internet and embedded-operation environment without relying on components from others. In 2000 the platform was launched and our first international branch office opened in Tokyo, Japan. In 2001 we launched a full series of SuperMap GIS, including object-based GIS SDK, SuperMap Object III, internet GIS, SuperMap IS, and SuperMap Deskpro, our desktop GIS. The embedded GIS SDK platform eSuperMap was launched in 2002. This GIS suite was quickly adopted by China’s GIS market. In 2004 we launched SuperMap GIS 5 and bought our office in Beijing. Two more subsidiaries were established: EarthView Image Inc in Beijing and Digital City Information Technology Co Ltd in HangZhou, China. EarthView Image is a joint venture with the Institute of Remote Sensing Application and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and is the main distributor of the QuickBird satellite imagery in China. We are the primary distributor for ER-Mapper, certified partner of Microsoft and Oracle, and a member of the ChangFeng Open Standards Platform Software Alliance in China which promotes the open software standard within the Chinese IT industry. In 2005, with the launch of the cross-platform SuperMap GIS Universal, SuperMap GIS became the second best-selling GIS platform/software in China and it now belongs to the top five GIS brands in Japan, where no fewer than five ministries, Japan Coast Guard and Japan Railway are using our software. To target the international GIS market, SuperMap International Ltd was established in July 2006.

Product Philosophy
The SuperMap GIS suite is designed to reduce the cost of data collection, map conversion and application development. As a spatial management core it can be easily adapted to any IT system and enables most developing countries to speed up their socio-economic development. We adopt and maintain open standards and want to close the gap between GIS applications in western countries and Asia by simplifying and encouraging transfer of western GIS applications to Asian countries. We will invest heavily in the research and development of cross-platform functionality, database warehouses and innovative application toolsets.

Five-year Plan
Our international marketing strategy takes the form of a two-pronged five-year plan. While we present our product to resellers in developing countries as a GIS platform alternative, on Asian markets we partner solution providers whose products and services can be imported into developing countries through our channels and platform. In the coming two years we will focus our international marketing attention on developing countries in south-east Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, where government and utilities are our primary targets and reseller channels and partnerships will be established. We aim to improve on our current position as second best-selling GIS platform/software in China, to become first and double our revenues. Two more supporting branches may be established in the Middle East or Eastern Europe and India at the end of this phase. In developed countries we want to set up a market for brand building and will focus on establishing solution partners. In the second phase of the five-year plan we will focus on solutions and application markets in developing countries in tandem with their economic and technological growth. It is foreseeable that we will also export GIS solutions from our partners in China to developing countries and extend our marketing to Africa and South America. In the second phase the emphasis will be on marketing our products as an alternative GIS platform in regions such as the north Americas, Australia and Western Europe.