DJI, the world's leading commercial drone marketer, plans to invest on developing commercial drones as part of its strategy to attract demand as the company takes measures to offset the slowing growth in the consumer market. The company is based on Shenzen and it currently owns 70 percent of the world's commercial drone market.
The drone maker foresees its latest drones including its Mavic 2 and the Agras MG-1 to be profitable as industrial machinery which will contribute more than half of the U.S. $9 billion drone market all over the globe.
Bill Chen, the company's enterprise partnership manager, said during an interview that the company found success in the consumer side and they will now focus into other industries. He added that they are expanding to serve different companies, operations, and industries around the globe. He noted that one of the areas for the enterprise business is the use of their drones in agriculture. He highlighted the need for hi-tech ways to meet the increasing demand for food as the world's population grows.
The company's Agras MG-1 is engineered for precision in its variable rate application of liquid payloads such as fertilizers and pesticides for spraying crops. The new strategy in DJI's marketing is aimed to develop its products and services to better compete with global emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. The company's new strategy follows other firms move. Last November, Tencent Holding's, operator of the social media platform WeChat announced that they are planning to invest in industrial internet applications.
According to Chen, the company continuously searches for ways to increase the accessibility of its drones in the consumer including the development of its battery life or decreasing its unit's size. He also said that on the enterprise side, the company sees huge potential demand for drones which have become a kind of mandatory tool for many industries.
Pan Xuefei, an analyst from the research firm IDC, China's consumer drone market is growing slow and the enterprise business of using drones to serve companies is expected to have big potential which is expected to be the major trend in the country's drone industry.
The IDC reported that China's consumer drone market annual growth rates dropped to 73.2 percent in 2018 from 80.6 percent in 2017.
Recently, the DJI announced that it has fired some of its employees after discovering cases of fraud that might cost the company millions of dollars.
