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DJI, which holds a significant 70% share of the global commercial UAV market, is devoting more resources to the development of industrial UAVs as part of a strategy to take into account corporate clients to offset the slowdown in market growth General public.
The Shenzhen-based company believes its latest drones, including the Mavic 2 and Agras MG-1, are for the industrial sector, which accounts for more than half of the US $ 9 billion global UAV market.
"We have really been successful on the consumer side and we are now leveraging what we are doing very well in other areas. We are developing to serve different companies, operations and industries around the world, "said Bill Chen, head of corporate partnerships with DJI, in an interview. "One of the key areas for businesses is the [the use of drones] in agriculture. With the world's population growing, we must find more high-tech means to meet the growing demand for food. "
The DJI Agras MG-1 octocopter, the flagship product of the company's agricultural fleet, is designed for precise and variable application of liquid payloads such as fertilizers and pesticides for crop spraying.
The shift in strategy comes as Chinese technology companies move their products and services into the value chain to better compete globally with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. Tencent Holdings, the operator of China's largest social media platform WeChat, announced in November its intention to expand to industrial Internet applications.
In the consumer market, DJI "is always looking for ways to make drones more accessible [and] increase the life of the battery or reduce its size, "said Chen. "On the business side, we see a huge potential demand for drones that have become a kind of mandatory tool" for many sectors.
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"The growth of the Chinese consumer drone market is slowing down," said Pan Xuefei, a drone badyst at the IDC research company. "The use of drone for companies by companies should have great potential. This will be the main direction of the Chinese drone industry. "
According to IDC, the annual growth rate of China's consumer drone market has slowed to 73.2 percent in 2018 from 80.6 percent the previous year.
DJI's deployment of a development kit that allows software developers to write applications for specific tasks, similar to the way Apple supports applications for its iPhone, shows that the drone maker is in the process of move from a manufacturer to a platform operator.
"Ten years ago, we were a technology company that made computer equipment," said Chen. "We are now moving to a platform company, providing not only physical platforms … but also software platforms to [help customers] manage their data badysis. Our goal is to create versatile platforms that can also be addressed by third-party developers. "
With the transition to a platform company, privacy will become a particularly thorny topic for DJI. The Chinese tech giant has been facing data security problems due to its global expansion, this issue being fueled by intensifying the Sino-American tension.
In response, DJI said in an independent study released last year that it had verified that its users controlled how their data was collected, stored and transmitted. DJI's efforts to validate its data security claims come after the US military banned the use of its drones for security reasons.
The drones of the company had been widely deployed by the US military, especially during special operations in Syria. In response, DJI introduced a so-called local data mode, allowing users to fly their devices without any data being exchanged between the driver and the Internet during flights.
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