Views from the Industry: The Drone Industry Barometer 2019

Last year, together with INTEAERIAL Solutions, we conducted a Drone Barometer Survey to produce a free whitepaper with perspectives from the drone industry. The paper proved so popular and so many of you who attended the IAS conference asked for it again, that we decided to create a Drone Industry Barometer 2.0. Having gathered data from over 500 respondents from 74 countries, we now have broader and more thorough barometer results than ever before.

To address increasing demand and answer your calls for more views from non-European drone industry papers, we decided that this year the survey would be even bigger. This survey highlights a variety of challenges that the drone industry continues to face, as well as the changes in perspectives compared to 2018.

Comparing last year’s perspectives to this year’s, drone companies had a much more difficult time than expected. While many predicted that this year would be fairly positive and strong for them, it turns out that many companies struggled to increase their sales and as such did not grow as quickly as they had anticipated.

More and more resources are being spent on sales and marketing. Survey results show major increases in company spending on improving sales & marketing apparatuses, while product development is getting allocated less money.

We asked drone service companies to tell us for what purposes they use drones. Here we found out that drone service providers (DSPs) often handle tasks like mapping and inspections. Meanwhile, more operational tasks like surveying and monitoring stay in house and are mainly handled by internal drone services.

When asked about who the most important market-driving actors are, most companies listed E2E (end-to-end) solution providers. This is largely because their customers are increasingly seeking all-in-one drone solutions to fulfill their demands. As these companies continue to fine-tune their products, it’s clear to the drone industry that its future hinges on E2E solutions in order to outcompete traditional (non-drone) approaches.