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TURBULENCES – After years of steady growth, global sales of recreational drones have stalled in 2018. For builders like the French Parrot, the surprise landing is rather brutal.
– Cédric Ingrand
For fans of drones, and for all those who have done their job, the shower is icy. After eight years of growth, the consumer drone market "is going through a crisis of growth", as explained by the statement of Parrot, the Frenchman who almost invented the sector. In the third quarter of 2018, sales plunged by almost 20%, twice as much for machines sold between 500 and 800 euros. No luck for a Parrot who had just launched in the summer Anafi, his new model head of gondola, stack in this price range.
If the numbers are clear, the diagnosis is less so. Hard to pinpoint the reasons for a sudden pause in sales growth. Perhaps there has been a little too much enthusiasm for machines that concentrate the best innovations of the moment – sensors, batteries, autopilots, photo sensors, wireless communication, image processing. .., the list is long- but which is not for all that a tool of everyday life for the general public. The drone put under the tree often suffers from the "squeegee effect": a lot of envy the first time, but not enough to use it more than a few times in the year. And for machines whose best consumer models range from 500 to 1,000 euros, the equation is not really there.
The warning signs of the crisis had already been there for some time: at the beginning of the year, GoPro had thus thrown in the towel. Not easy it is true to live under the shadow of the Chinese giant DJI, which today accounts for 70% of the consumer market, but does not publish its sales figures.
Only thinning in a gray landscape: professional uses, they explode. Beyond machines specially designed for the inspection of industrial installations, for military purposes, for the surveillance of agricultural crops, there are all the professional uses of machines for the general public. In the police, firefighters, we often go into intervention with his drone, to get to the height of a fire or accident. Many real estate agents also have a drone folded into their wallet when taking snapshots of a house for sale. These uses are recurrent and constantly increasing.
If sales suffered, Parrot's stock price fell to a halt, losing half of its value on the day the company published its accounts last Friday, for a 80% decline in total since the beginning of the year. year. In the course of the day, the company today would be worth more than fifty million euros. Enough to push Henri Seydoux, who founded Parrot 25 years ago, to regain control of the company, by launching a takeover bid on its own company to get out of the stock market volatility, like what a Elon Musk had wanted to do for Tesla a few months ago, without success.
Parrot, which employs about 600 people, will lay off a hundred, and still expects a difficult 2019 year. But not to the point of throwing in the towel. On the contrary, Henri Seydoux says today that he wants to make society a pure player of the drone.
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