Comment by cm2012

If it's a matter of national security, why would it be made available to the American consumer? They'd have more than enough business from the DoD, and wouldn't have to compete on price.

That didn't use to be true. There was once several Western consumer drone companies (3D Robotics, Parrot, GoPro, Intel, etc.) as recently as the mid-2010s. They gave up on the consumer space because DJI just totally ate their lunch, releasing better, cheaper drones year after year. I still remember how in any given year, the annual DJI drone releases would be smaller, cheaper, better, and fly longer than the other companies' drones (which were always a few years out of date) – AND they would have a whole range of consumer, prosumer, and professional drones and various kits and bundles for every market segment and price point. Nobody else could even remotely keep up.

Here's one Western article with some background: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-26/dji-s-dro.... According to it, by 2020, DJI had 80% of the US consumer drone market. It discusses how DJI ruthlessly operated its business and crushed all of its competitors. Even a later startup, founded by Tesla engineers who wanted to build batteries right into the frame, didn't do so well and was soon acquired by another company.

It's not that nobody bothered TRYING to compete with DJI. Everyone tried, both in the West and in China itself (e.g. Yuneec, Autel), but DJI beat them all. Their founder is basically the Chinese version of Musk.

From that article:

> A rather confounding issue Impossible has faced is that the purchase bids put up by police and fire departments often have specifications that guarantee the sales will go to DJI. To illustrate, Gore pulls up a request for proposal for a drone from the Kansas Highway Patrol that lists properties such as flight time, cameras, and payload capacities. The numbers match up exactly with those of DJI’s Matrice 210. “If the U.S. wants to be competitive in robotics and drones, the least it can do to jump-start its own industrial base is to award government contracts to American companies or at least let them compete for them,” Gore says. “There are about 1,000 police departments receiving DHS grant dollars and spending them on Chinese-made, DJI-made drones. We are using our federal dollars to fund what could become one of China’s first prime contractors.” [...] “DJI has incredible lobbyists,” Gore says.

> Western drone companies haven't bothered competing in the consumer space

This is factually wrong. Most drone companies have tried in the consumer space before pivoting towards the military. The military has been more and more present since around 2019, and most Western drone companies have pivoted to the military since Ukraine. Not because it's more profitable, but really because they failed in the consumer space.

Also the military makes it easier for Western companies because DJI cannot compete (obviously). But I am absolutely convinced that DJI is better at making military drones ("micro aerial vehicles") than the West.

Just have a look at the money VCs and governments have thrown at Western drone companies before claiming it's a money problem.