Searching for a New Course Amid the Storm

My first encounter with a DJI product was in the spring of 2014. Not long after the release of the Phantom 2, a friend who had been into model aviation for over a decade came to my house with a large white box bearing the DJI logo, saying he wanted to show me something great.

We assembled the drone in an empty area of our residential community. After a few simple instructions, I pushed the joystick, and the quadcopter rose steadily, hovering in mid-air without the slightest wobble. For the first time, I could fly a drone without needing to assemble the flight controller myself or spend an afternoon adjusting parameters. I could even see clear footage from the air via my phone screen.

At that moment, I realized this company was no ordinary player.

Before DJI, model aviation was an extremely niche hobby. Being able to fly a drone without crashing already made one an expert, let alone aerial photography. DJI lowered the barrier to entry, making it accessible for ordinary people.

The rest, as we know, is history. With successive generations of products like the Phantom, Inspire, and Mavic, DJI kept raising the bar for consumer drones and established itself as the absolute global leader. At its peak, eight out of every ten consumer drones sold worldwide were DJI products.

Now, over a decade later, in 2026, conversations about drones among friends feel entirely different.

A few years ago, someone would always pull out a Mavic during gatherings, suggesting a flight by the river for a group photo. Now, most friends who bought drones leave them gathering dust in cabinets, their last flight possibly half a year ago, let alone upgrading to a new model.

Even long-time model aviation enthusiasts who once eagerly awaited DJI's new releases have lost their enthusiasm, saying that all the necessary features are already there, and updates only offer slightly longer battery life or marginally better obstacle avoidance—not worth upgrading.

This shift is the most telling sign that DJI has reached a turning point.

The era of rapid growth fueled by consumer drones is over. This 20-year-old Chinese hard-tech benchmark company now faces a vastly different market environment: its monopoly on the consumer drone market, which it has dominated for over a decade, is peaking, with slowing growth and increasing regulatory pressures in overseas markets. Meanwhile, new ventures in industrial-grade drones, intelligent driving, and home robots show promise but have yet to fully establish a second growth curve.

Next, I will discuss my thoughts from three perspectives: why DJI's growth logic in the first half has reached its limits, what it has achieved and encountered in exploring a second curve, and what core challenges it truly needs to address in the second half.

01

Defining the Race with Products but Hitting Growth Limits

DJI's first half was a history of rewriting industry rules through product excellence.

In 2006, Frank Wang founded DJI in a warehouse in Shenzhen's Lianhua Village, shortly after graduating from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. With only a self-developed flight control system and a small team, DJI entered a global drone market dominated by military equipment or DIY kits for hobbyists, with no mature consumer products.

Wang and his team focused on the industry's core pain point: flight control stability. Over several years, they mastered core technologies like flight control, gimbals, and image transmission, standardizing them into consumer products.

The 2013 release of the Phantom 1 marked the beginning of the consumer drone era. This ready-to-fly product transformed aerial photography from a professional skill into something anyone could do easily. Subsequent iterations of the Phantom series pushed product capabilities to new heights. The 2016 Mavic Pro, with its professional-grade performance packed into a foldable body, widened the gap with competitors.

From then on, DJI's global market share in consumer drones climbed steadily, consistently exceeding 80%, with 76.8% in North America and over 80% in Europe, making it the undisputed global leader.

In 2025, DJI's revenue is estimated at RMB 90-95 billion, up 12-18% year-on-year, with a net profit margin of 38-40%—far exceeding the consumer electronics industry average. It invests over 15% of its annual revenue in R&D, accumulating tens of thousands of patents in core areas like flight control, gimbals, image transmission, and computer vision.

To put it bluntly, among Chinese consumer electronics companies, DJI stands alone in achieving such dominance in a global market.

However, the business logic that supported DJI's two decades of rapid growth is now fundamentally shifting. The most critical change comes from the structural peak of the consumer drone market itself.

Data from Statista and Frost & Sullivan shows the 2025 global drone market estimated at around $42 billion, with industrial and military drones each accounting for about 40%, while consumer drones decline. Since 2023, global consumer drone shipments have contracted for two consecutive years and are expected to shrink further to around 18 million units by 2030.

Behind market saturation lies a complete shift in demand logic.

Previously, consumer drone growth came from the explosion of aerial photography demand and the dividend (dividends) of social media content creation. Drones, as novel products, quickly transitioned from professional tools to mass-market consumer goods. But now, aerial photography has become a conventional tool, with users' upgrade demand weakening and the appeal of product iterations diminishing.

In 2025, the average price of consumer drones keeps falling, and price wars have erupted in the mid-to-low-end market. Insta360 has gained significant market share with its cross-over panoramic drones, while brands like Autel Robotics are siphoning off DJI's entry-level users with cost-effective products.

More critically, challenges come from overseas market uncertainties. Historically, over 70% of DJI's revenue came from overseas, with the U.S. and Europe as its largest markets. Last year, the U.S. FCC placed DJI on its "Covered List." While this doesn't affect sales of already authorized models, it completely blocks new products from entering the U.S. market.

DJI's core competitiveness lies in rapid product iteration. Without the ability to launch new products in the U.S., its existing offerings will gradually lose competitiveness over time. In Europe, Italy's Competition and Market Authority launched an antitrust investigation into DJI around the same time.

These changes show that in consumer drones, DJI has pushed a track (track) to its limits over two decades—and reached its ceiling.

02

Mid-Game Breakout: From Air to Ground, the Advances and Retreats of the Second Curve

With its core market peaking, DJI began exploring a second growth curve.

Last year, DJI's industrial drone revenue grew significantly year-on-year, capturing about 50% of the global market by third-party estimates.

Agriculture is the largest application scenario for industrial drones. Frost & Sullivan data shows that in 2025, DJI and XAG formed a duopoly in China's agricultural drone market, together controlling over 70% share. Beyond agriculture, power grid inspections are another core growth area. Last year, State Grid's drone inspection procurement grew significantly, with DJI securing about RMB 1.83 billion in related orders.

However, the business logic of industrial markets fundamentally differs from consumer markets. Consumer markets rely on standardized products, extreme performance, and pricing to win users. Industrial markets demand complete, end-to-end solutions covering hardware, software, localized services, and even custom development for specific scenarios.

I once spoke with a power grid inspection professional who said that while they previously bought DJI's drones, they now need complete solutions that directly convert inspection data into defect reports and integrate with grid management systems—not just flying machines. For example, many State Grid tenders now use "data-per-kilometer" pricing, no longer directly purchasing drones but requiring service providers to deliver compliant visible light, infrared, and LiDAR data based on inspection mileage.

For DJI, whose core capabilities lie in product development and supply chain management, with relatively standardized ToC sales channels, transitioning from hardware supplier to data service provider is no easy task. The industrial market requires deep engagement with specific industry scenarios, a profound understanding of user needs, localized service teams, and even ecosystem co-construction with industry partners.

In external perceptions, while industrial drones form the foundation of DJI's second curve, intelligent driving will determine its ceiling in the second half.

In 2023, DJI's automotive business spun off as Autodrive Technology. In 2024, its total revenue reached RMB 80 billion, with consumer drones remaining core, while industrial business (agriculture, surveying) revenue grew 120% year-on-year. Autodrive's core advantage comes from cross-scenario technology reuse. DJI's two decades of machine vision, environmental perception, and autonomous control algorithms from drones naturally fit intelligent driving's core needs.

But make no mistake: the intelligent driving race is far more competitive than drones.

Huawei has formed significant advantages in the high-end market with its full-stack capabilities in chips, computing power, large models, and communications. NIO, XPeng, and other new forces insist on full-stack self-research, with intelligent driving becoming their product's core competitiveness. Baidu Apollo continues to deepen its presence through years of technical accumulation.

In this competitive landscape, while Autodrive has secured a foothold in the mid-to-low-end market with cost-effectiveness, expanding its share further poses formidable challenges—not to mention the internal uncertainties in commercialization timing.

Automotive-grade requirements differ completely from consumer products. Reliability, safety, and lifespan standards for vehicle-mounted products are extremely stringent, requiring lengthy testing and validation cycles. This places entirely new demands on DJI's engineering capabilities and supply chain management.

Founder Frank Wang once said that everything DJI does now relates to robotic vision. Current robots are still "blind." If DJI can achieve breakthroughs here, its applications could expand vastly.

The core logic is to extend DJI's core capabilities in machine vision and autonomous control to all spatial intelligence scenarios.

From last year's debut of its first robotic vacuum cleaner, the ROMO series, to the educational robot brand RoboMaster, and in agriculture, beyond aerial drones to ground unmanned vehicles—the difference is that these extension fields are already highly competitive. In robotic vacuums alone, five companies—Roborock, Ecovacs, Dreame, and Xiaomi—control nearly 70% of the global market.

03

The Second Half's Challenge: Evolving from Product King to Ecosystem Player

Standing at this crossroads, DJI's second half is not about defending its drone market but evolving from a drone company into a global leading spatial intelligence technology company.

Around this core goal, DJI must answer several critical questions.

The first question is: where are the limits of technology reuse? DJI's core competitiveness lies in machine vision, autonomous control, gimbals, and image transmission technologies from drones. These technologies have strong reuse potential in automotive, robotics, and industrial scenarios, significantly lowering R&D costs and accelerating product launches.

But technology reuse lowers entry barriers without solving all problems. Different scenarios have distinct technical requirements and industry rules. For example, automotive-grade certification differs completely from consumer product standards. Family robots face entirely different user needs than drone aerial photography.

The second focus is whether organizational capabilities can evolve alongside business expansion. In his 2026 New Year address, Wang used a vivid metaphor: Early DJI was like a fast-growing herb—rapid growth, strong vitality. But now, DJI needs to become a woody plant with sufficient load-bearing capacity to withstand different storms.

Historically, DJI has been a product-driven company with a short decision chain and rapid market response, built around consumer drone R&D and production. Now, operating multiple business lines—consumer, industrial, automotive, robotics—each with entirely different business logics and organizational requirements, demands completely new organizational capabilities.

Beyond these, a company's global narrative needs new content. DJI was once a model for Chinese tech globalization, winning markets with product excellence. But under current deglobalization trends, with Western supervision (regulations) on Chinese tech firms tightening, DJI's old globalization model has hit bottlenecks.

How to maintain existing businesses in Europe and America (Europe and America) markets under compliance, extend product lifecycles as much as possible, while aggressively expanding in Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and other emerging markets to find new growth sources—these are critical questions. More importantly, DJI must shift from product globalization to technology and ecosystem globalization to become the infrastructure of the global spatial intelligence industry, not just a hardware seller.

The final strategic choice is between openness and closure—and finding balance. Historically, DJI's product system has been relatively closed, with full-stack self-research in hardware, software, and algorithms. This model ensures extreme product experiences and builds deep technical moats but also limits ecosystem development.

Today, whether in industrial drones, intelligent driving, or robotics, open ecosystems are essential to attract more developers and partners. Huawei's intelligent driving business follows this approach—evolving from a product company into a platform tech company.

From a 2006 startup in a Shenzhen warehouse to the absolute global leader in drones, DJI has written a legend for Chinese hard-tech companies over two decades.

Now, the legend turns a new page. On one side of the crossroads lies past glory; on the other, future uncertainties. Whatever path DJI takes, it will remain a benchmark for China's hard-tech industry.

Original content from Xinmou