Drones of different varieties have been used during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
A $500 product is able to drop little bombs into car windows.
And that’s something where you just haven’t really seen with other technology.
The world’s biggest drone maker DJI is one of many companies that
has found their products used on the battlefield.
The unfortunate thing is that it’s a very reliable product.
So, it’s become a product of choice, even for those who want to use a drone inappropriately.
Do you know that this drone is used in military circumstances?
Yeah. Because it’s actually very rugged and very precise.
How fast can it go?
On paper, it’s 72km/hour.
What is it about DJI drones that make people go crazy?
It’s very easy to use. I don’t have to worry about having to know the manual.
The global drone market is expected to grow from $30.6 billion in 2022 to $55.8 billion by 2030.
And more than 70% of that is dominated by the Shenzhen-based company.
DJI’s meteoric rise is an impressive feat for a Chinese brand,
one of the few that have succeeded on the global stage through its ingenuity.
DJI’s story began like many other successful tech start-ups – in a college dorm room,
where an ambitious young student named Frank Wang developed early prototypes
of what would become the foundation of a multibillion-dollar privately held empire.
The model plane enthusiast had a simple goal at that time:
to create a flying toy that would be sturdier than the flimsy version in the market then.
Today, DJI, which stands for Da Jiang Innovations, has been dubbed the ”Apple” of the drone industry.
Its product line-up includes robots and camera accessories such as gimbals and stabilizers.
Its first commercially successful product was The Phantom drone, which Wang claimed
in a media interview made DJI the first company to bring "military-grade technology” to the public.
Frank had an edict that if you get the product right, everything else will fall into place.
Even today where we have 14,000 or more employees,
25% of our employees are research & development focused.
So, we're now the only manufacturer that really manufactures everything from, say,
a 250-gram drone that you would use to fly for, let’s say, family vacations and to get fun videos,
all the way up to an agricultural drone that would spread seed or pesticide across farmland.
We have a suite of various drones that are good for search and rescue, public safety,
fire, construction mapping, everything.
But consumer drones are just a small subset of the
wider drone market – eclipsed by drones used for commercial and defense purposes.
At the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a Ukrainian minister
called out DJI for being complicit in the war through its use by the Russian military.
This compelled DJI to formally deny that its products are designed for military use.
We don’t adapt our products or weaponize them for combat use,
and we certainly don’t support their use for combat.
We’ve even gone the step of actually stopping sales to both
Russia and Ukraine during the current conflict.
Most of the reports that I’ve seen in the media reference people buying
products in third countries, where you can literally buy at any electronics retailer.
It’s very hard for us to stop that.
We don’t actually know who the end users of our products are.
And for the most part, we don’t have any way of tracking that.
And that would be just as true as any other consumer electronics company, though.
Everything from sort of Samsung, to iPhone, to whatever else.
The recent controversy around DJI products
being used for warfare isn’t the only challenge the company has had to face.
In December of 2021, the drone maker was placed on an investment blacklist by the U.S. government,
which banned American investors from buying or selling shares in the company.
The U.S. Treasury Department specifically singled out DJI for providing drones to
the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau, which American authorities allege are
being used for the surveillance of Uyghur Muslims in the region.
But the move is largely symbolic as it’s a private company, meaning
its ownership structure and full list of investors are not publicly available.
A lot of the concerns have always stemmed from
the relationship between the Chinese government and Chinese corporations.
And that’s raised a lot of concerns with U.S. regulators, but also in Europe.
David is the Head of Research at DroneAnalyst,
providing insights into the commercial drone industry.
He was also a founding member of DJI’s enterprise business, leaving the company in 2020.
With any technology, there’s gonna be great applications and life-saving applications.
And there’s things that we need to manage and avoid.
The big question that all of us should have is, what is each company doing
as a role to police their own products and police their own efforts.
We've stated unequivocally that we have had nothing to
do with treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
In fact, we have quite stringent language in all our distributor
agreements that states that they have to abide by U.S. sanctions.
The truth is that we've gone through numerous audits of our firmware and of our products.
But we've also cooperated with the US Department of Interior with their audit,
with Idaho National Lab doing an audit for Department of Homeland Security
and in no case that they found that data is going anywhere it shouldn't.
However, the U.S. Department of Defense named DJI “a Chinese Military Company” in 2022,
leading the drone maker to step up lobbying efforts in Washington
against a national security ban on its products.
If you want to share videos with us, you have to opt in to share that data.
The same for flight logs.
We've even created a local data mode.
That means when you're flying one of our products, you don't even need to connect to the internet.
You couldn't even transfer data through a mishap or mistake.
You're literally hermetically sealed off from the internet.
Paolo Stagno is a cyber security expert, who back in 2018, uncovered
vulnerabilities affecting the Phantom 3, one of DJI’s leading drones at the time.
Basically, I performed security audits on all its components.
I was able to send spoof GPS signals to the drone in order to pretty much control all its movement
in mid-air, as well as bypass the no-fly zone that at the time, DJI set on specific locations.
That’s pretty much systemic to all the consumer drones
because they do not have any mitigation for that.
However, DJI's popularity makes it particularly susceptible to exploitation, Paolo said.
There is like a black market of modified drones’ firmware.
Most of the pilots that want to unlock the drones try to download such firmware in
order to remove limitation about height and distance from the drone operator.
In November 2022, DJI’s Core Crypto Engine, which is fitted on most of its drones,
received a pass from the U.S Department of Commerce for meeting critical data security requirements.
If they've broken any existing laws in their country, that is really a
matter for the police to take on. It's not something that we can actively engage in.
But the security concerns surrounding the use of DJI drones don’t stop there.
In 2019, DJI released a drone detection platform called Aeroscope in response to potential safety
and security challenges in high-risk areas such as airports, prisons and government facilities.
Aeroscope, basically, it’s a ground station that you can
use to track and find drones and drone operators.
For example, there are reports of the Russian army using that
specific technology to track and find drones or Ukraine’s drone operators.
If any of our distributors participate in anything that's seen as modifying for
military use, it would be grounds for losing their distributorship.
I mean, we take policing that quite seriously.
Even though it doesn’t command a monopoly – with brands such as Autel and Skydio
striving to make inroads in the market – demand for DJI products remains brisk,
says Charles, an employee at a photography equipment rental company.
Whenever we talk about stabilizers and gimbals, people will just turn to DJI
and we’ll seldom hear people talk about like, I want to enquire about other particular brands.
But you do carry other brands here, right?
We do.
And how often does that get rented out?
Once a year.
Were you aware that DJI has been in the news the past couple of years due
to privacy issues, security issues and even militarization of their products?
We weren’t really aware of that.
But with all this, I think we still didn’t face any drop in rentals.
What’s next for DJI in the next couple of years?
Drones currently have to be flown within visual line of
sight with one person operating the sticks, right, like flying.
We now have a product that would enable beyond visual
line of sight in semi-autonomous operations.
And that's something that regulations have not caught up with yet.
And the drone maker has its eyes on the automotive industry too.
In 2016, it launched an automotive project that is
now a full-fledged subsidiary focused on autonomous driving.
From my experience at DJI, we’re just scratching the surface.
It’s certainly a company that despite the headwinds, has a lot going for it.