What’s the Deal With All These Chinese Drones?

I’ve been watching the rise of China’s DJI consumer drone company for over a decade, ever since DJI launched the cheap drone epoch we’re living in today with the release of the original Phantom back in 2013. The Phantom was revolutionary, the first drone that pretty much anyone could use to shoot sweet footage of surfers – a device that launched an entire industry of drone service providers, and turned the Shenzen based company into, arguably, China’s closest answer to Apple.

At the same time, the United States and other countries have grown increasingly suspicious of DJI’s motives and loyalties, and lawmakers, like the odious Ron DeSantis in Florida, are rolling out new policies that crack down on the use of Chinese-made drones by government employees, from police officers to state university researchers.

Which might seem kinda reasonable, as compared to the other things DeSantis gets up to, except there’s one big, fat problem: there is no non-Chinese consumer drone company that does what DJI does. Much less does it at such a low price-point, which is a vital consideration for the vast swaths of modern drone users who don’t have unlimited cash to throw around.

And building a DJI-killer is a lot harder than you might assume: although a number of Western competitors tried to knock DJI off the pedestal over the last decade, they all failed. Partially, this was because DJI’s Shenzen location gives it direct access to the world’s biggest source of electronic parts manufacturing. Partially, a lot of those Western consumer drone companies made some really dumb decisions. Eventually, they largely stopped trying.

This is also why both Ukrainians and Russians are continuing to chew through vast quantities of DJI drones on the battlefield, despite massive misgivings about their reliance on Chinese tech. While Russian leaders may regularly claim that they’ll be coming out with a DJI replacement any day now, I’m not exactly holding my breath.

What’s more, our uncomfortable dependence on DJI creates a pretty enormous problem for civilian drone users in every country that doesn’t get along with China. If DJI drones were suddenly banned in one fell swoop in the US tomorrow, as some GOP lawmakers are calling for, then the civilian drone industry would be, to put it delicately, completely screwed.

I believe that it’s possible for the US and Europe to figure out how to build drones that can actually compete with DJI products, but it’s going to take some government support and changing up some of our existing priorities. Anyway, read the full Foreign Policy story here.