Hey there 👋
There is a good chance you have seen a drone in the sky at some point. Maybe at a wedding, a concert, or an expensive photo shoot.
And there is an even better chance that the drone was made by DJI.
You might not know the name.
But if you have ever watched a travel video on YouTube, seen aerial footage in a movie or documentary, you have almost certainly encountered DJI’s products.
The company single-handedly controls somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of the global consumer drone market depending on which segment you look at.
A 2024 estimate puts DJI accounting for over 90% of all consumer drones sold globally.
More than the numbers, the interesting part is DJI’s story.
It starts with a boy losing his remote-controlled helicopter and figuring out why it crashed the way it did.
And the funny side to this story is that he initially didn’t plan to build this giant drone company.
So, in this article I’ll start with that story of how DJI came to be, how it stands against its competition and what the future looks like for consumer drones and DJI.
The Drone We’re Talking About
Before we go further, let’s make sure we are all on the same page about what a drone actually is and how it stays in the air.
A drone, in the context we are talking about, is basically a radio-controlled helicopter with four rotors. The pilot controls it remotely, either with a handheld controller or from a phone or tablet.
The kind of drones DJI makes are called multirotor drones. Most of the popular models are quadcopters, meaning they have four propellers arranged around a central body.
To understand how a drone stays up, think about what keeps a regular helicopter in the air. A single big rotor spins and generates lift.
The problem is that spinning a single rotor creates a rotational force that would spin the whole body of the helicopter in the opposite direction. That is why helicopters have a small tail rotor, to counteract that spin.
Drones solve this better. Two of the four propellers spin clockwise, and two spin counterclockwise. The opposing spins cancel each other out, so there is no spinning body.
To move forward, the drone tilts its front motors slightly down by spinning them a bit slower. To turn, it adjusts the speed of individual motors.
All of this happens automatically, dozens of times per second, through the flight controller chip inside the drone.
The flight controller is the brain of a drone. It reads data from sensors, processes it, and adjusts motor speeds constantly to keep the drone stable.
Without a flight controller, a drone would be nearly impossible for a human to fly manually.
This is the initial problem Frank Wang set out to solve.
Crash Of An RC Helicopter
Frank Wang is a guy born in China, in 1980.
As a child, he read a comic book in which the protagonist flew around the world in a small red helicopter. That image stuck with him and he wanted one of his own.
Our guy Frank studied hard enough that his parents eventually bought him a toy model helicopter. He crashed it the moment it left his hands.
That crash, instead of putting him off, made him obsessed. The problem was not the helicopter. The problem was control. Why was it so hard to keep these things stable in the air?
That question followed Frank Wang all the way to university.
He went to the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. In his senior year, he took on a class project to build a flight control system for a model helicopter.
He stayed up nights working on it and presented the result to his professor, Li Zexiang.
The presentation was messy. The system did not fully work. But Professor Li saw something in Wang and brought him into the graduate program to keep developing it.
By January 2006, Wang and his small team had cracked it. The helicopter flew. It hovered. It landed. Stable and controlled.
Out of curiosity, Wang posted his result on a model airplane forum and offered the system for 50,000 Chinese yuan, which was about 7,000 US dollars at the time.
It costed him 2,000 dollars to produce it. To his surprise, people were willing to pay. And that’s when he saw a business.
In March 2006, he co-founded DJI with two teammates. The name stands for Da-Jiang Innovations, which loosely translates to Great Frontier Innovations.
His goal at the time was small. “If I can feed a team of 10 to 20 people with this, that would be great,” he said in an interview years later.
From A Dorm Room To The Skies
The early days of DJI were not glamorous.
Wang moved with his co-founders to Shenzhen after graduation, renting a small apartment and funding the operation with leftover scholarship money and support from family.
A family friend named Lu Di provided 90,000 US dollars and helped manage finances.
DJI’s first product was the XP flight controller series. These were not drones. They were the flight controllers that we just talked about above.
Essentially, flight controllers are brains that went inside drones that hobbyists were building themselves at the time.
Before companies like DJI existed, flying a radio-controlled aircraft was serious business.
You had to buy components from different sources, assemble them yourself, calibrate everything, and then pray it did not fall out of the sky.
Most people who tried lost aircraft in spectacular fashion.
The XP flight controller changed that for a lot of hobbyists. It came pre-built and provided stable, reliable performance out of the box.
DJI sold around 20 units a month, mostly through word of mouth and online model airplane forums.
In 2009, a team used DJI’s flight control system to fly a drone to the peak of Mount Everest. It was a proof of concept that the technology worked in extreme conditions. Orders started coming in more consistently after that.
Professor Li joined DJI as chairman. A family friend sold his apartment to invest in the company. A high school friend of Wang’s joined in 2010 to run marketing and began pushing DJI into hobbyist markets outside China.
The early years were hard. Wang was a perfectionist and an exacting boss. Most of the founding team eventually left.
There was even an incident where an early employee tried to steal DJI’s intellectual property and sell it to a competitor.
Wang wanted to sue but could not afford the legal fees. Professor Li helped settle the dispute and raised additional capital to keep the company alive.
Through all of this, Wang kept iterating on the technology.
The Drone That Made DJI
By 2012, DJI had built enough components around drones. They had the technology for flight controllers, motors, and GPS systems.
Wang decided to put it all together into a single product. And on January 7, 2013, DJI launched the Phantom 1, its first ever drone.
It was priced at 629 US dollars. It was white, compact, and required no assembly. You pulled it out of the box, charged the battery, connected a controller, and flew it.
It was the first consumer drone you could just fly. Full stop.
Every other quadcopter on the market was either a DIY kit or an industrial product costing tens of thousands of dollars.
It used GPS to hover in place automatically. If it lost signal from the controller, it would fly back to where it launched from on its own.
The press release DJI sent out was two paragraphs. It said: “You can fly your Phantom the moment you receive it.”
That year, DJI’s revenue went from about 4 million dollars to 130 million dollars.
The drone community had never seen anything like it. Filmmakers realized they could now get aerial shots that used to require hiring a helicopter crew at thousands of dollars per hour.
Wedding photographers (esp in our part of the world) realized they could shoot from angles no one had ever captured before. YouTubers could make their travel videos look cinematic too.
By 2015, DJI was the largest consumer drone company in the world. Competitors who had existed before the Phantom began quietly shutting down or pivoting away from hardware entirely.
But the Phantom was just the beginning of what DJI was building.
How DJI Builds Almost Everything Itself
