New report on China's booming UAV industry - DIY Drones

China’s WJ600 Jet-Powered UAV

From my email, a promo for a new market research report. No doubt very expensive, but it's interesting (and appropriate) that China's UAV industry is finally being taken seriously. Those who think that the Chinese UAV companies are just cloning Western designs are badly out of date.

From the email:

"As predicted in the two most recent Market Intel Group (MiG) technology and market forecasts on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), China is pushing aerial drone research and development aggressively. That is also the conclusion of a recent Wall Street Journal article on a major Chinese air show

Market Intel Group’s research reports, titled: “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for Counter-Insurgency – Market & Technologies Outlook - 2010-2015” and “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for Border Security – Market & Technologies Outlook - 2010-2015.” identify regions, applications, strategies and types of platforms that will lead the rapidly emerging Counter-Insurgency and Border Security UAV markets worldwide. As part of our analysis, we identify China as one of the more aggressive and unpredictable entrants into the heated UAV market.

The WJ600 pictured here is offered as an example of recent Chinese development that is designed to position this country’s UAVs at the forefront of this competitive market. Jeremy Page, in his WSJ article, writes: "China is ramping up production of unmanned aerial vehicles in an apparent bid to catch up with the U.S. and Israel in developing technology that is considered the future of military aviation.” MiG assumes that China would sell UAVs to nations boycotted by the US and Israel. Such an assumption was also confirmed in a round-about way in this article. Page quoted a Chinese official who told him: "I can't tell you which models we have sold overseas, as that's secret, but of course we're interested in exporting them." Since UAV deployment information is mostly public domain, as well as a major marketing tool for competing vendors, keeping information about deals under wrap points to the possibility that such deals were made with countries that current major UAV vendors are reluctant to do business with.

MiG’s new UAV reports analyze, among others, Concepts of Operation, platforms, payloads, evolving markets and applications, allocations, procurement patterns and resultant changes in the rapidly evolving UAV industry worldwide."

via diydrones.com