People are getting used to that soft, female robotic voice in their cars telling them where to make the next left turn as they pass through an unfamiliar city’s traffic tangle.

But they might not imagine that the very same GPS technology is sitting on the control panel of the heavy equipment at the nearby highway construction site.

Like, can’t dozer drivers find their work sites by themselves?

Actually, using satellite technology to pinpoint the position of a backhoe’s shovel or direct the blades of a bulldozer or grader is not all that new.

In fact, since GPS signals can tell you where you are within a foot or so, it has largely replaced the surveyor’s string and chalk as the method of choice to tell you what spot to dig in and how to coordinate the precise locations involved in most construction sites.

When Caterpillar, the world’s principal manufacturer of earth-moving equipment, opened its first joint undertaking in China in 1994, that country was among the poorest in the world, and bicycles, not cars, ruled the streets of Beijing and Shanghai. Now that China has become the world’s biggest market for machinery, it brings in about 9 per cent of Caterpillar’s revenue.

While many other international brands have had mixed results in China’s consumer division, Caterpillar has been quite successful in maintaining its hold on China’s high-end machinery market. A run of recent prestigious pullbacks by multinationals include Mattel’s closure of its Shanghai Barbie store and shut-downs by Best Buy and Home Depot.

Unlike the consumer world, the heavy machinery sector has meant profit for foreign companies – like Caterpillar and Japanese rival Komatsu – which offer better, if more expensive, quality than their domestic competitors.

Caterpillar now has about a 7 per cent market share in China, as recently it has become more attentive to the Asian giant, even moving group president Richard Lavin to Hong Kong last winter. Caterpillar further took the extraordinary step of issuing renminbi-denominated bonds in Hong Kong last year, to help gather funds for its leasing business.