Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology, or SSST, is the company behind China’s Qianfan constellation. It was founded in 2018 with money from the Shanghai municipal government and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, making it less a private venture and more a state instrument packaged as commercial.

In February 2024 it raised the equivalent of about $930 million in a single round from a group of government-backed investors including the National Manufacturing Transformation and Upgrading Fund and CAS Capital. The money is earmarked for building out satellite production lines and scaling launches. Manufacturing is handled by a subsidiary, Shanghai Genesat, working with CAS microsatellite institutes.

The project is ambitious on paper. Phase one calls for six hundred satellites by 2025, with a plan to scale to nearly 1,300 by 2027. The long-term target is more than 13,000 by 2030. The first launches began in 2024 on Long March 6A, with around ninety satellites in orbit by early 2025. The deployment has already shown weaknesses. One launch left an upper stage shedding debris into LEO, creating over a thousand close approaches within days, undermining the narrative of sustainability that Chinese media has tried to attach to the program.

SSST is building more than spacecraft. It is positioned as an industrial ecosystem: satellite factories, integration with Shanghai’s broader G60 “Starlink” corridor initiative, and close alignment with state telecoms for service distribution. The service model is not aimed at consumer dishes in rural homes. It is designed as a wholesale platform to give China sovereign control of space-based broadband and to export capacity to selected partner governments.

The reality is that the company is still in the early stages. It has money, political backing, and some satellites in orbit, but nowhere near the cadence or reliability of Starlink. What matters is not the service today but the signal it sends: China will not allow LEO broadband to be dominated by foreign operators. SSST exists to turn that policy into hardware, even if the technical execution is uneven for now.