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DJI : The making of the consumer drone industry.

I remember seeing a drone for the first time in the movie 3 Idiots back in 2010, and it felt like a cool toy helicopter to have. Fast forward to 2016, I saw a drone video coverage at a colleague’s marriage, that’s the first time I saw a drone up close, (quite a large one) for real and had a heart attack after being told the rental cost of wedding photography using drones. “That’s cool but expensive and needless tech” were my exact thoughts that night while driving home.

In 2018, I was hiking through Ninh Binh in Vietnam, and saw an Asian couple take an aerial shot of themselves at the summit. It was a relatively smaller drone and impressed me with its agility and video clarity. The movie 96 was released in the second half of 2018 and when I saw the song “Life of Ram” on big screen, I realised that few portions of the song were shot with drones, that was my moment of appreciation for this tech. Inspired to buy one myself, I found DJI drones on Amazon and the price was so exorbitant that I decided to sit this one out and wait for the cost of technology to plummet rather than break my bank with an impulsive purchase.

2025 is a few months away and here I am still waiting to buy a drone because I don’t have any reason/ hobby to buy one. But that’s not the point, 2010 to 2024 is a long time. While we continue with our lives, drones have gone through continuous innovation and silently made an indelible mark that many countries are building major Military/ economic initiatives based on drone technologies.

The consumer drone tech industry is dominated by one major brand “DJI” and I was curious to learn what made them so. Turns out they are not just the category leader but also the inventors / innovators of the entire consumer drone category.

What is DJI ?

Da Jiang Innovations Science and Technology Co Ltd better known as DJI, is the world’s largest commercial drone manufacturing company. DJI dominates 70% of the market in sales volume. A privately owned company based in China, estimated at billions of dollars in valuation, has its humble beginnings from a dorm room of a Chinese student named Frank Wang (Occidental name), studying Electronic engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2006. It’s worth mentioning that Accel was one of its early investors.

Early Days:

Frank received HK$18000 (~ 2300 USD current day) as research grant for his university project on autonomous hovering of helicopters. Along with his friends and mentor, Frank and his team won the RoboCon Asia- Pacific Intercollegiate Robotics contest in 2006 which secured them HK$2 Million in funding. Shortly after they moved to Shenzhen (the manufacturing hub of China) to launch DJI from a small 20-Sq.m warehouse.

Common knowledge would correlate any Chinese endeavour with cheap labour / manufacturing and declare that to be a major factor in the success of a company like DJI, but there is more to the story.

Here are some fascinating insights on what I believe has helped DJI become the market leader and a true innovator:

Reasons why it's DJI in the drone industry!

Nurturing a talent ecosystem:

Having an office in Shenzhen, the manufacturing hub of China does not guarantee proximity to abundant innovative talent. DJI’s product innovation stems from their R&D team and finding the right people was always a big challenge. Traditional Chinese education system lacked the finesse of creating a workforce that could excel in cutting edge technologies. There was a large gap moving research graduates from a learning mindset to applying them at work. DJI looked within their company and found that almost half the employees they hired came from the RoboCon competition background. This realisation led DJI to launch their own conference in 2013 – Robomaster Summer Camp.The Robomaster competition attracted the best minds from universities across China and few of the winning teams over the years have been given job offers to join the R&D team at DJI. The competition helped achieve many technology breakthroughs like image transmission, winning code for climb, return to start point etc.

Inspired by the competition’s success, DJI partnered with district bodies across China to nurture AI talent in school children by launching “The AI Education Kit”, a program that introduces students to basic AI concepts, underlying principles and coding skills needed to build autonomous robots. It also helped teachers reskill through a parallel “Train the trainer” program. Over the last 10 years, DJI has heavily invested in nurturing local talent through these competitions and educational activities. The spillover effects of these initiatives is visible from the mass interest in the field of UAV across China, seen in the Chinese Patent database (PatSnap / Zhihuiya).

Refer to the chart below, 8000+ patents have been granted so far and since 2011, the number of UAV based patents has doubled every year and is growing strongly.

In 2023, DJI hired over 500 employees through these channels and DJI Education is now a formal division of the company with a mission to educate young people and introduce them to advanced drone technology.

Note : As of this writing OCT 2024, DJI has shut down the DJI Education program in the US over regulatory issues.

The Ethos of DJI Design :

The audacity to make it first, the drive to make it best,and the vision to make it accessible to all.

Before drones came into existence, Remote controlled flight or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) were the popular choice for anyone with a passion to fly. Most components in RC planes were custom assembled and designed for the RC hobbyists / enthusiasts community. Even back in 2006, it took considerable effort to fly these RC planes by the most skilled of pilots. Frank and his team wanted to build a better flight experience that will enable anyone to fly an RC plane.

In 2008 DJI launched its first ever hardware – The DJI XP Flight Controller.

Flight controllers until were clunky and time consuming to assemble (required cross functional skill set).The controller instructed the helicopter how to move based on inputs given from a remote held by the pilot in ground. Achieving flight stability was a bit of a challenge with multiple factors involved like antenna range, wind speed, balancing for flight etc. With the DJI XP controller, the commands were precisely executed and flight stability achieved through an autopilot mechanism. It created an uproar within the RC community.

RC planes / Helicopters were still larger, noisy, heavy and posed a risk when flown near people, which made them formidable and stopped more people from entering the hobby. DJI as a company wanted to change that. They proposed the first ever design of replacing the single large propeller of a helicopter with multiple smaller ones. (There is an entire blog on DJI’s website about how they design their propeller systems that is worth the read, attaching them to the end of this article). More propellers meant improved agility in movement (spin, tilt etc) and equidistribution of load on the main frame + payload weight. A major decision for the design team was to decide on the number of propellers needed.The initial design has 8 propellers but eventually the team felt 4 propellers was all that’s ever needed to deliver a lighter, safer vehicle with a longer battery period.

DJI launched the Flame wheel in 2011, probably the first ever dominant design to the modern day drone and it came as a kit to assemble in a box. Winning many accolades from the RC community, the Flame wheel still required soldering and programming to be in flight. That was one step closer to the reality of enabling everyone to fly.

DJI Flamewheel, Source: DJI Website

In 2013 DJI launched Phantom 1 – the world’s first, out of the box, ready to fly consumer drone, without any assembly requirements. It was designed to be compact, streamlined, discreet and aesthetically pleasing. Phantom 1 led the paradigm shift from only a small group of skilled RC pilots/ mechanics flying a plane to anyone on the internet buying one and flying it out of the box. It was an instant hit paving the way to the birth of the whole consumer drone market.

Stable camera technology:

Phantom’s success never stopped the DJI team from pushing its boundaries forward. They were immediately looking at the next problem to solve : What if the Phantom could take photos and record videos one day?

Most users were strapping up tiny (Expensive) action cameras with timers and hovered around a target with blind hopes and a lot of guesswork in taking pictures / recording videos. The drone’s movement / wind would shake the camera resulting in blurry videos / pictures. Accuracy and image sharpness were non-existent. DJI wanted to build an integrated drone technology by fitting a camera to a drone.

“No one had ever done that before.” Peter Tao, one of the R&D engineers recollects “The technology we needed for a proficient camera system of such small size just didn’t exist. We simply had to create an all around solution ourselves”

DJI launched Zenmuse Motorised Gimbal later in 2012, which made them an entrant into a whole new product category : Professional camera stabilisers. Through the Zenmuse Gimbal, users would now mount their DSLR camera to a drone and take a smooth aerial shot. Until then capturing a good aerial shot meant putting a skilled cameraman in a rental helicopter.

Source: DJI Website

What’s a Gimbal?

A gimbal is a stabilising device that allows a camera or other object to pivot along multiple axes (typically three: pitch, yaw, and roll), enabling smooth and steady footage by counteracting unwanted movements. Gimbals have been described in ancient Greek and Chinese for millennia and used in scientific inventions till date.

DJI’s stable aerial photography owes its success to the Gimbal technology they have perfected over the years. The Zenmuse was the world’s first gimbal that was driven by a brushless motor stabilised with gyroscopes for high precision motion control.

They wanted to bring the precision of aerial photography to everyday life and design a product that would fit into the pocket of a person enabling them to capture everyday adventure. It’s designed to be a brand new camera language.

Source: Pocket Osmo Design Patent

It’s interesting that DJI’s design inspiration for the Pocket Osmo and the famous filmography gimbal Ronin S comes from simple objects like a tennis racket (specifically to support single handed operations), lipsticks, and Tesla’s 18650 batteries.

DJI Product Launches : For the complete timeline, visit DJZ Photo DJI Product History.

Theory of Dominant labels and Dominant Design.

Going back to the first paragraph of this article about my experience with drones from the time period of 2010 to 2024, I remember calling the drone shown in the movie 3 idiots as a “Quadcopter”. It wasn’t until 2016 at a wedding that I came across the word “Drone”. Until then “Drones” in my mind were a reference to the cool looking miniaturised military jet bombers that were shown in popular Hollywood movies. This illustrates the emergence of a “dominant label” over years, a subset of “The theory of Industry life cycles” proposed by Fernando F. Suarez | Stine Grodal, MIT shared below,

Based on this study, any product category before reaching its mature state takes many years to arrive. The Product Category is collectively defined by a single dominant label. The label has to emerge dominant from a chaos of multiple labels used to define a category at its nascent stages. The dominant label is socially negotiated and agreed by the key players in the market at this early stage. A dominant label sets the right product expectations from the category but the category by itself is not mature until the emergence of a dominant design. Dominant Design will define the “Rules of membership” for any company that identifies itself with that product category.

DJI was an early entrant to the UAV space which was not a consumer grade category to begin with as early as 2006 and involved in building hardware for RC planes initially.The Success of Phantom 1 ensured the popularity of the term “drone” and clearly defined what a drone should look like and function. Almost every drone company that emerged after Phantom’s success had to replicate and “have” the same features and even structural similarity to be accepted as a Drone. In 2018, DJI introduced the Mavic which redefined the rules of membership yet again with a more miniaturised version and foldable rotors.

Image Source : Internet, shows the design language taking a drastic shift from Phantom to Mavic.

Momentum towards Indigenous Semiconductors

Semiconductor shortage is a global phenomenon and with the rise of IoT and AI, the demand curve for semiconductors will reach its peak in the next 10 years and DJI has to prepare well for this global shortage prediction by constantly including

Here is an awesome Tear down and costing analysis of DJI INspire1 drone by Advanced Structures India. The cost pareto analysis (Refer table below) of all the components suggest that almost 80% of the cost is due to electronic and electrical components present and the N Core PCB board is the most expensive component.

I am adding some exhibits from other websites below for your reference to illustrate the different semiconductor components involved in the production of DJI drones. DJI has been dependent on other major US corporations to mass produce their products and gradually over the years moved to designing their own components and semiconductors.

Some studies claim DJI has made arrangements with the Chinese semiconductor manufacturer GPixel to help supply CMOS sensors and other smaller chipsets but unable to find supporting articles to verify the claim. Readers can share any findings related to this.

Exhibit 1 : Sharing unmodified findings from Advanced Structures India Webpage

Source : https://advancedstructures.in/dji-inspire-1-drone-teardown-and-costing/

The major portion of this cost (68%) is consumed by the drone sub-assembly such as vision position sensors, transceiver, PCB, GPS antenna, and controller are high-cost items.The other position in the Pareto (22%) is occupied by the controller sub-assembly where parts such as the data processing PCB which receives the signal from the drone and the HDMI port PCB which help in enhancing the quality of the data suitable for larger screens, without it the data quality would be low.

From the above plot, it is evident that the electronic components take up a higher portion of the cost.

N-Core PCB had the highest child part cost 43%. Its cost is due to the presence of an RF transceiver- which sends and receives a signal from drone to controller.
Another is due to the presence of a clock-out buffer, which is used to create multiple signals and distribute them to other components.
The CMOS image sensor in the vision position sensor contributes to 68% of the cost and a micro-controller
The motor controller of the drone has a flash micro-controller, transceiver-IC, and an N-Channel MOSFET contributing to 44% of the cost of the component

Exhibit 2. : Global supply shortage article with components based on this article

From the above article, I have created this table on different western manufacturers involved in the process of building DJI Mavic Air 2 drones around 2021.

Exhibit 3 : Article from sUAS News about DJI’s Reliance on Western semiconductors

In a detailed analysis, the article supports their claim with clean visuals of the evolution of DJI PCBs over the years and their reduced reliance on Western semiconductor companies. It’s safe to conclude that most of these components today are made in house and DJI moving towards an indigenous drone tech company.

Major Partnership Initiatives

DJI Phantom 4 in 2016

DJI Air 2S in 2021

DJI Avata 2 in 2024

Major Partnership Initiatives in Detail

Microsoft :

DJI announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft in 2018 with the aim to integrate advanced AI and Machine learning capabilities to help businesses harness the power of autonomous AI vision. DJI released a software development kit for Windows 10 enabling users to build native applications that control various aspects of these drones from their computers and help analyse videos / photos captured by drones using machine learning and connecting to Azure IoT Edge cloud. With this partnership, DJI will have access to the Azure IP Advantage program, which provides industry protection for intellectual property risks in the cloud.

Syngenta :

Syngenta, the Swiss based agribusiness giatn and DJI have established a partnership aimed at enhancing agricultural practices through drone technology. The collaboration will focus on leveraging Syngenta’s expertise in crop management, particularly in pesticide application, to improve the functionality of DJI’s drones within the agricultural sector.

Delair :

DJI and Delair have partnered to enhance visual data collection and analysis for enterprises. Delair will sell DJI drones through its global channels, while also integrating DJI’s hardware with Delair’s data management platform, delair.ai. This partnership aims to offer end-to-end visual intelligence solutions across sectors like construction, agriculture, and infrastructure.

Hasselblad :

DJI recently got a minor stake in the quintessential Swedish camera manufacturing company Hasselblad to synergise on learnings on improving the image quality of their gimbals.

Challenges Ahead: Geopolitical Tension

While DJI continues to be the market leader with their products available for sale in 100+ countries at the moment, the future looks uncertain for the same momentum to continue because of rising geopolitical tensions between China and the rest of the world.

China’s Data Sovereignty and State security laws give the state full access rights to data owned by private companies. This is a serious threat to any country having Chinese manufactured Drones in their airspace as the state apparatus can gather intelligence by having access to these data through backlinks.

The US has called for a ban on CCP Drones in the US and as of this writing, in the process of passing a legislation through the US congress.

India has also banned import of new DJI drones in it’s airspace raising concerns over security.

Conclusion

There’s are lot of unanswered questions at the moment regarding how the new regulations would affect DJI, it’s important to understand the different attributes and conditions that has led to them dominating the consumer drone industry.

There’s a lot of interest lately from most countries on building an extensive drone ecosystem and I hope to continually see more countries champion building indegenous drone systems.