History of SuperMap

1992-1993, the company founder, Dr. Zhong Ershun found that a lot of governmental organizations were paying a lot of money for buying expensive GIS software from oversea producers. He also noticed that GIS is only applied by a few governmental institutions and mainly operated by professional geographers. He thought that GIS shall not be monopolized and it shall be more popularly applied not only by geographers but also for enterprises and even publics. During that time, Dr. Zhong and his team decided to develop our own GIS software.

1994-1996, Dr. Zhong's team developed the first version of SuperMap GIS, it was an ActiveX based GIS SDK and first named to ActiveMap. It was the first most complete component based GIS which not only provides Map control, but also 3D Map control and Layout control, etc.

1997-1999, SuperMap Technologies, Inc. was founded. The product was renamed to SuperMap and was successfully applied in the Hong Kong Integrated GIS project and several Land Information Systems in different municipalities of China.

2000, the first commercial version of SuperMap GIS products - SuperMap Objects 2000 was successfully released. Application developing company started to buy SuperMap and developed all kinds of GIS applications. At the same year, SuperMap Japan was founded in Tokyo, Japan.

2001, an upgrade version of SuperMap Objects was released (V2.0). Besides, more new products were developed and released, including eSuperMap, SuperMap IS and SuperMap Deskpro and SuperMap SDX. SuperMap Product line became complete and started to support Oracle and SQL Server through SDX technology. In Japan, SuperMap released the first Japanese version.

2002, More applications were developed with SuperMap GIS by SuperMap and our partners. SuperMap started to develop the Universal GIS products, which is targeted to support J2EE and .NET.

2003, SuperMap GIS 2003 (V4.0) series were released. During the SARS time, SuperMap helped the government do better decisions for defeating the SARS and received good reputation and better market recognition. SuperMap became the second GIS brand in Chinese Market.

2004, SuperMap was listed as one of the TOP 5 GIS brands in Japan market according to a British company's investigation.

2005, SuperMap GIS V5.0 and SuperMap UGC V1.0 were released. A complete English version of SuperMap GIS V5.0 was first released, too. SuperMap was listed as the Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific by Deloitte.

2006, SuperMap GIS V5.2 were released in three languages (Chinese, Japanese and English).

2007, the International Business Division was set up dedicating to international marketing promotion and sales. GeoInt and GEO Solutions became SuperMap Master Distributor for Nordic and Botswana respectively. The company CEO Dr. Song was honored as Top 10 IT Leaders of China.

2008, SuperMap Technologies, Inc. changed its name to SuperMap Software Co., Ltd.

2009, SuperMap Software Co., Ltd was public listed in Shenzhen Stock Exchange of China (300036.SZ).

2010, SuperMap Software Co., Ltd released the SP1 version of SuperMap GIS 6 in May. Based on the users reports and market investigation, the software functions have been improved and a number of new functions have been added to SuperMap GIS 6 SP1.

2011, with the trust and support from clients and partners, SuperMap grows fast. To keep up with the increasing growth, SuperMap has moved to the new head office.

2012, China Association for Geographic Information Services announced recently on its website that SuperMap GIS 6R(2012) ranked first in the Three-dimensional (3D) GIS Platform Software Testing and Evaluation.

2013, Biennial SuperMap GIS Technology Conference was hold successfully again this year. As an outstanding GIS platform provider in China, SuperMap showed the improvement and innovation in GIS products made during the last two years to the public. 

2014, WGDC 2014 was held in the National Conference Center with the theme “Fusion, Open, and Intelligence”. SuperMap, the largest GIS platform vendor in Asia, with the internationally leading technology, brought advanced products SuperMap GIS 7C to fully participated in this event. 

2015, SuperMap GIS Technical Conference (STC) 2015 was held in Beijing International Conference Center at 10th-11th, September, 2015. There were more than 5000 attendees and more than 50 different industry reports. With the theme of “Different GIS, different value”, the conference presented the newest GIS technology, leading GIS platforms, and rich industry solutions.