Video Lift off for China's booming drone market

Chinese drones are taking off literally - and financially - and are now the biggest supplier of drones in the global civilian market.

As more and more consumers buy and use the technology - the makers discuss the future of the industry and some of the challenges they face.


Founded in 2009 by an engineer with a childhood love of radio-controlled model planes, DJI has become the biggest supplier in the global market for civilian drones.

They are possibly the first Chinese company to achieve that status in a consumer industry.

The company has grown from 20 employees to a workforce of 2,800 including Chinese, Americans and Koreans at its headquarters in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen and has offices in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Frankfurt.

DJI's latest model - the Inspire 1 - was released in November.

It carries a camera that can send live video to a smartphone, with a GPS system to compensate for wind and hold it still mid-air.

Its starting price is $2,899 USD, while the Phantom 2, DJI's bestseller, sells for $679 USD - or $959 USD with a GoPro camera included.

DJI sees itself as the creator of "consumer-accessible robots," according to Michael Perry, a Texan who is the company's public relations director.

"There has been a proliferation of applications that we never even thought possible for the Phantom," he says.

"Everything from archaeologists using this to fly over the Incan ruins so that they can more accurately develop the land in Peru and not ruin their cultural heritage. Farmers who using it for precision agriculture, real estate agents that just want a new perspective on the property that they are developing. You could say you could develop individual products for each of those markets but instead, why not create one system that everybody can use and then customise according to their individual applications."

The drone company is now part of an emerging wave of Chinese startups in fields of robotics, clean energy and telecoms.

The Communist Party hopes they will transform the country from the world's low-wage factory to a creator of profitable technology.

Guangdong Province, where Shenzhen is located, is home to several other budding drone companies, including Ehang.

It was officially founded in April.

Located in an abandoned theme park on the outskirts of Guangzhou, the young startup clashes in style with that of DJI's more polished atmosphere.

Ehang's Research and Development unit is a big bright room where scruffy-looking twenty-something college graduates tweak, tinker and experiment on dozens of unfinished drones.

The startup launched a crowd-funding campaign on website Indiegogo in November to fund their new 'Ghost' drone.

In less than six weeks, they raised over $600,000 USD, six times more than their initial goal.

"Think about drones as the centre of the "Internet of Things" in the air," says 25-year-old Derrick Xiong, a co-founder of Ehang.

"It's like your Wi-Fi router at home, it connects everything. So drones, in the air itself, can carry a lot of stuff, not just a camera for aero-filming. It carries a lot of different equipment, it can be combined with Oculus or Google Glass or any sort of smart watch. Any kind of input or output devices. So, I would say the potential of drones is huge."

The most basic Ghost drone sells for $375 USD without a camera, while the more advanced version, which includes a GoPro camera and a gimbal (pivoted support), sells for $879 USD.

To make sure that drones are accessible to everybody, Ehang's engineers developed what Derrick Xiong describes as 'Avatar mode'.

Both DJI and Ehang say most of their business happens outside China.

According to Xiong, the Chinese market is not yet "mature enough to generate huge sales".





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