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Know DJI Drones: Largest Marketing Share in the Drone World

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DJI Drones

If we talk about DJI drones, DJI is the entrenched market leader in the drone world. The DJI’s reign over the drone world is continuously expanding and there are no indications of this expansion slowing down in the near future.

The China-based tech giant has an approximate 74% market share according to the 2018 Drone Market Sector Report by Skylogic Research. That has increased from 72% in 2017 and 50% in 2016.


The 2018 Skylogic research included an online survey that incorporated the views and opinions of about 2,500 respondents as part of their three-month project sponsored by DJI, DroneDeploy, DroneInsurance.com, and Trimble.

DJI Drones

Yuneec with a paltry 5% market share is ranked at the second spot. Yuneec has recently come up with the $500 Mantis Q which is being considered a rival to the DJI Spark while their Typhoon H Plus is equipped with Intel RealSense technology. Intel invested $60 million in Yuneec just a couple of years back.

In relation to drones costing between $1,000 and $1,999, which is generally regarded as the Prosumer market, DJI’s market share is even higher at 86% in comparison with the previous year’s 84%.

Quite appalling is the fact that the consumers may not be necessarily interested in compact-sized portable drones such as the Mavic and Spark series. Instead, the DJI’s Phantom 4 series is a massive hit among consumers as it helps them garner a market share of 29% in contrast to the Mavic Pro series with about 26% share.

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The reputation of the DJI Drones

DJI are not the leaders in hardware design and engineering only. In terms of payloads, their Zenumuse RGB camera/sensor/gimbal combination makes up approximately 31% of all purchases which seems to be a gigantic increase from the last year’s meager 4%. When it comes to software, the DJI drone is again ahead of the race in-flight logging and operations and automated mission strategizing.

The report has been released just a week after Airware, a former Silicon Valley drone startup, announced its closure. The manufacturer endeavored to come with their own hardware but ended up burning millions of dollars of venture capital funding and eventually could not sustain the rigors of competing with the giant that DJI has become.

GoPro was once deemed as promising contenders for the top spot in the race against DJI drones but they also had to lay off hundreds of employees in different rounds. They also found life hard when several of their drones had to be recalled owing to reports coming out that their Karma drones were crashing down rather too often. Lily, another promising drone that never made it to the mainstream market, also had to shut down, though it was recently acquired by Mota and re-released as a gizmo that was never even close to what the original drone had received a hyped for.

The industry of DJI drones has not only been able to produce hardware and software with cutting edge technology but also come out as vociferous proponents of government and policy conversations around geofencing, making micro-investments with their SkyFund and in strategic partnership investments with other tech giants such as Hasselblad.

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