Comment by seanmcdirmid

> That is to say, if you can make a drone for $200, and DJI puts one out for $50, you don't really stand chance

The situation was more that western companies could make a drone for $1000, and DJI would make a significantly better drone for $500. Were they both $1000, the DJI drone would still clearly be better.

I am not praising DJI for free here. I just think that we need to face the truth. There is no way to improve with denial.

Drones weren't just a commodity to be farmed out to the lowest bidder, though. DJI had significantly better technology in addition to being cheaper. They had better transmitters (with the standalone controllers), redundant sensors, obstacle detection and avoidance, camera sensors and lenses, FLIR, flight time, range, wind correction, gimbals, FPV headsets... all of it. Each year they'd come up with some major innovation and iterate on all the other parts, while their competitors would stagnate for several years at a time between new models (which couldn't compete even at release). In any given year, DJI always seemed to have the advantage. They did all of that ON TOP of being cheaper.

You don't get to do that by simply undercutting your competitors. No, DJI handily won the drone wars by being cheaper AND better and constantly improving. They simply outcompeted.

I think we have a tendency to look down on Chinese manufacturers as copycats, but DJI is an exception to that rule. Their founder Frank Wang was basically a young college engineer who bootstrapped the whole consumer drone industry, worked ruthlessly hard, and stayed way ahead of his competitors, becoming Asia's youngest billionaire. Forbes story about him: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2015/05/06/dji-drones-f...

The Wikipedia article is also interesting and shows how ruthless and effective the company was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJI (for better or worse)

I mean, compare them to Lenovo, who's done nothing really new since they took over Thinkpads from IBM (except maybe folding convertibles). DJI is the polar opposite of that; they invented not only their own brand of drones, but pretty much created (and then dominated) the entire consumer drone market across the whole world.

If they were an American company, we'd be celebrating their success and Wang would be right up there next to Musk. DJI doesn't nearly get enough credit for the crazy amount of R&D they had to do to get the consumer drone industry to where it is today. Even if some of it is military trickle-down, that doesn't usually happen that quickly and cheaply. Even police & fire, who usually inherit those techs, tend to go with DJI, despite them not being US-made. IMO it's a shame that DJI happens to be caught up in the political turmoil of our times. Their products really are far above their peers. (And I don't even own any; sold my Phantom a decade ago.)

I don't know DJI's financials, but they've been around for nearly two decades by now. If they've been able to fool investors (or even the CCP) for that long while secretly losing money the whole time, well... guess they made a good business out of it? At least they made a useful product, compared to most of our shady ad-tech companies.