Drone market statistics, analysis and forecast

Most countries consider the UAV market and related development and sales as one of the key components of GDP growth. The drone market value is estimated at 22 billion USD in 2020 and is expected to grow almost twice by 2025 ^[1]. This is mostly related to the recent R&D and technology progress, once the implementation of the tasks requiring a high level of autonomy became possible and affordable.

At the moment, we somehow observe in many developed countries saturation of the drone operators for popular tasks like video filming, movies, in general, those requiring RC. Yet the market opens for fully autonomous systems, and it is also possible, because of the ongoing regulations and standardisation on the use of the air space by autonomous UAVs, including Europe-wide standardisation (see the chapter on regulations).

Interestingly, the Fortune Business Insights reports on drone software market size to be around 6bln USD by 2027 (1.2bln USD in 2019). As the driving factor, the report mentions increased adoption of the AI (Artificial Intelligence) in both drone operations and data processing, grabbed by UAVs ^[2].

This optimistic growth is affected by the following factors:

• Lack of worldwide (as in case of passenger planes) regulations on the airspace use, communication equipment and utilities for autonomous flights: many individuals and companies defer the decision to buy UAV hardware, considering future incompatibility of their purchase with coming regulations, unknown at the moment.
• Large market fragmentation: with some leaders (i.e. DJI for commercial and recreational devices) and other competing companies, trying to find a niche.
• COVID outbreak, that affects delivery chain thus hardware availability (on the other hand, COVID outbreak caused demand on contactless delivery, where drones fit perfectly).