On April 9, Yifei Intelligent Control (Tianjin) Technology Co., LTD. (referred to as yifei) announced the completion of nearly 100 million yuan “A+” round of financing, led by AVIC Trust Holdings Co., LTD.
Previously, ONE Aviation has been a number of domestic well-known capital investment promising, the strategic financing of AVIC capital, not only marks one aviation official promotion to the ranks of the national team, but also the first national participation, investment in the FIELD of UAV major event, the industry will be redefined.
Since 2004, the core team of Yifei has accumulated core technology in the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and first proposed the concept of “brain” for uav in China. After achieving the first application of several domestic commercial uAVs, it was officially established in TeDA in 2015.
Established less than 3 years ago, AVIC took the initiative to endorse, what is the business logic behind a fly? After hitching a ride on the faster-than-light speed, where will companies go next?
Consumer stock market a red sea, Matthew effect is obvious
According to the application field, uAVs can be divided into military, commercial and civilian consumption categories. The first outbreak of DJI, opened the consumer market to fight the prelude.
There are two “small” things can be seen: first, a number of TMT giants began to set foot in uav business, such as Qualcomm, Intel, Baidu, Xiaomi, Tencent and other enterprises have invested in or set up their own UAV RESEARCH and development centers in recent years; Second, Internet elites and teams within the industry leave to start their own businesses. For example, Chen Wenhui, a former lenovo executive, founded Pegasus, and Qi Juntong, a former post-80s doctoral director from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, formally jumped out of the system to set up Yifei in 2015.
Entrepreneurs have gone into the sea, but they need to be vigilant is that the stock market is an important indicator to determine the current living space of enterprises. With the emergence of giant monopolies in the consumer market, start-ups must first address a matter of life and death — financing.
According to the latest statistics released by Qianzhan Industry Research Institute, from January to August 2017, there were 16 financing enterprises in China’s UAV industry for 17 times in total, obtaining a total financing of about 520 million yuan, among which 8 companies did not obtain financing for the first time.
In other words, the startup team is no longer favored by the capital side. The era when “a good story + a cool PPT+ a team with a good background” can raise a lot of money is gone.
Indeed, not only are start-ups struggling to raise money, but some established companies are also struggling to escape the cash-strapped black hole. In the last month of 2016, two well-known companies reported a series of lay-offs of more than 100 employees, making the industry in an uproar.
Since 2015, capital forces have tightened the purse of UAV start-up projects, and consumer UAV has faced the pressure of both capital and market winter.
Investment and industry experts generally believe that the growth rate of the market, which has been squeezed out of the bubble after the consumer market was overconsumed, has gradually slowed down and will show the Matthew effect for a long time.
The commercial incremental market continues to accelerate, spawning industry unicorns
On March 14, Zhu Tao, deputy director of the Flight standards Department of the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), revealed at a press conference in Beijing that uav is extending from the traditional aviation field to all areas of society, and is gradually transforming from recreational flying equipment into a new form of production tool involving various industries.
From toys, to tools, although a word difference, but the market prospect is almost “half water, half flame”. Unlike the consumer market, the commercial chain is very long. From the perspective of enterprise division of labor, it includes flight control system, whole machine supplier, electrical control development, big data solution developer, etc. In terms of application fields, including agricultural plant protection, electric power inspection, logistics and distribution, the market prospect of many segmented fields is more than 10 billion yuan.
Take the agricultural market as an example, the number of plant protection UAVs in China has reached nearly 10,000, but the ownership of agricultural aircraft in China only accounts for about 0.13% of the total number of agricultural aircraft in the world. Agricultural aviation operation area accounts for 1.70% of the arable land area, and the market size reaches 100 billion yuan.
Qi Juntong, founder of Yifei, said that although the plant protection industry looks beautiful, there is also a significant barrel effect in the uav market. “The shortest board determines the overall level of the industry.”
Take battery life as an example, electric multi-rotor UAV generally only has about 15 minutes of flight time, if used in plant protection, but also carry a large weight of medicine and batteries, the actual flying to 10 minutes is already qualified level.
The automatic detection and matching of terrain, automatic detection and classification of obstacles, spraying path, real-time planning, cm-level accuracy of positioning and control, a variety of technical barriers, led to many enterprises in the industry can only be gathered at the downstream of the industrial chain, depend on the purchase parts, saving machine result to incoming and out almost every day. Only a small number of enterprises that can develop and produce core hardware such as flight control system and electrical control and are in the upper reaches of the industrial chain can develop and grow.
“Not bad money” of a fly apparently in the latter. Since 2004, the core team of Yifei has been developing UNMANNED aerial vehicle (UAV) in China, and was rated as “the only flying robot R&D and application team in China and the world’s top ten most influential” by Journal of Field Robotics, the world’s authoritative Journal in the Field of Robotics. In 2015, Yi Fei was officially established, and Qi Juntong chose the flight control brain as the entry point. After gaining a firm foothold in the field of plant protection, the enterprise began to make all-out efforts in the upstream and downstream chain of commercial UAV.
Song Lu, general manager of AVIC Aifeike Fund Management Co., LTD., who is responsible for the financing of AVIC, also revealed that: As avIC’s industrial investment fund focusing on general aviation, the UAV industry has been our focus on the segmentation field.
“With more than 10 years of research and practical experience in flight control systems, Yifei team is a mature and proven mature RESEARCH and development technology team with leading advantages and market results in its products and technology platform. At the same time, it follows the market and technology development trend, set up a complete team system and business development strategy, which is an important reason why we are optimistic about Yifei.”
1. Yifei is the first private enterprise covering the whole industrial chain of commercial enterprises in China
In fact, in the field of agricultural plant protection, the complete machine manufacturers do not have the energy or ability to independently develop core industries such as flight control system and cloud platform.
To this end, Yifei starts from the actual pain points of customers, on the one hand, it is committed to making uav operation stable, simple and efficient, and constantly working on hardware and software, updating and upgrading new functions; On the other hand, we should avoid being both a judge and a judge. We should resolutely not engage in plant protection machines and encroach on the interests of customers. Instead, we should focus on the layout of the upstream industrial chain and improve the quality of products and services.
“Don’t let the money your clients spend become the bullet that ultimately kills you.” Qi Juntong said that at present, there will be some profits if we choose to join the overall market of plant protection, but we insist that the mainstream of the future is that the plate in the commercial field is big enough to support many upstream and downstream industry chain enterprises, and that market players should be quickly cultivated to enable enterprises in the field to develop as soon as possible.
At present, the industrial line of the enterprise has covered the whole uav navigation system, multi-redundancy flight control, big data cloud platform, APP management and operation, UAV training equipment, uav test flight airspace and other aspects, becoming the first private UAV enterprise in China that covers the whole commercial industry chain.
2. Big data cloud computing is suggestive, creating an agricultural version of Didi Taxi
Did not choose to share a slice of the market in plant protection machine, quickly seize the profit point, for investors, the surface seems to be a “pure money, play rogue” behavior. But in fact, Yifei has put more energy into cloud computing, big data and other frontier fields.
At present, Yifei has developed a large commercial uav cloud platform — Best Wisdom Cloud and best Farm mobile APP in China. “Uav belongs to the node or platform of aerial data acquisition and analysis. It is connected with big data and cloud computing. It is an intelligent system of data acquisition, analysis and transmission.” Qi said.
On the one hand, the intelligent system will serve as a powerful tool for government regulators to crack down on “black flying”. On the other hand, it will also solve practical problems such as information asymmetry between supply and demand of manufacturers and high maintenance and management costs.
In the 2017 agricultural operation season, drones equipped with a highly reliable and stable flight control system independently developed by YIfei have sprayed pesticide on more than one million mu of crops, using nearly 1,000 tons of spray. The cloud platform Best Wisdom cloud has obtained 160 million valid data, providing an umbrella for agricultural crops from heilongjiang province in the north to Hainan Province in the south.
In the future, the cloud platform will provide reasonable spraying time according to the big data of plant protection climate, meteorology, diseases and insect pests, so that one end is connected to the UAV of the plant protection team, and the other end collects farmers’ demand for pesticide spraying, and combines Qianxin location and Google map to create a new agricultural version of Didi Taxi.
The operation mode of “drop a drop, work immediately” will truly get rid of the practical land spraying problem of “scattered and small plots” since China’s decades-old household contract responsibility system, and realize the in-depth docking of UAV and big data platform “everything is interconnected and everything is integrated”.
3, positioning in the field of aerial intelligent driving, aiming at industry unicorns
Intelligent driving, refers to the machine to help people to drive, and in special circumstances to completely replace the technology of human driving.
On the ground battlefield, the era of intelligent driving in the air has come in full swing, and the situation of “burning money to seize the land” is like that of the consumer UAV market. Baidu, Google and other giants are in full swing, making all-out efforts to layout the market, while in the broader market of intelligent driving in the air, there are few distributors.
The deep-seated reasons include the lack of core technical personnel and the high technical threshold. Among the three types of aircraft with fixed wing, helicopter and multi-rotor as the mainstream, the multi-rotor aircraft has the simplest mechanical structure and power system, but at the same time, its endurance time and load are relatively minimum, and its stability is poor.
At present, domestic mainstream UAV manufacturers are mostly multi-rotor models, which is relatively simple technology, simple cut is not unreasonable. And, of course, to some extent it also limits the payload.
Many domestic uav manufacturers, including DJI and JEFI, produce and develop drones with a payload of less than 100 kg. In the ten ton level above the perennial entrenched Boeing, Airbus and other traditional general aviation enterprises, like Boeing 737 and Airbus 320 such a typical single-channel aircraft, the maximum takeoff weight is about 50-80 tons; However, there is almost no market for intelligent aerial driving of 100kg to tonnage in the middle.
From the technical point of view, want to cut into this trillion scale of the market, one way is positive research and development, from scratch research and development, production, test a consistent with the overall load, power, steering gear, which requires time cost and economic cost unimaginable; A simpler approach would be to reverse engineer mature manned aircraft into unmanned versions, replacing the pilot and some of the payload weight with flight control and other equipment.
Industry experts judge that intelligent driving in the air has a natural relationship with the general aviation industry, and the evolution path of general aviation is becoming two ways from closed door to research and development. Who can take the lead in mastering the core technology of general Aviation man-machine unmanned transformation, who will grab the entrance ticket in the future market, realize the opportunity of detours overtaking.
As the first private enterprise in China to master unmanned transformation of manned helicopter, YIfei has been successfully modified: MQ300: payload 100kg/maximum endurance of 4 hours, MQ500: Payload 180kg/maximum endurance 4 hours, Aurora, payload 190kg, diamond DA40, payload 344kg manned models, are in the leading position in the world.
Aerial intelligent driving is an important starting point for the combination of industrial revolution and information technology. It will change the flow mode of people, resource elements and products, and overturn the travel and life of human beings in the future.
(1) From the aspect of traffic, intelligent driving in the air will rapidly improve the traffic efficiency in the future and may become the first field to be broken through by artificial intelligence
(2) From the perspective of industrial and economic development, aerial intelligent driving will lead the business model innovation of the general aviation industry and reshape the industrial ecology
(3) From the perspective of environment, intelligent aerial driving will improve the air pollution of navigation
(4) From the perspective of safety, the aerial intelligent driving platform will evolve from a single traffic work to an intelligent platform, and will become a new focus of information security
“The biggest characteristic of general aviation industry is global manufacturing. The level, scope and depth of data management are directly related to the position and development space of enterprises in the future manufacturing pattern.” Qi Juntong said that yifei, a member of the national team, will take a global vision and open concept, through investment, merger and acquisition, absorb the advantages of European and American aviation powers in aircraft design, processing and manufacturing, and continue to introduce into the Chinese market, open up the upstream and downstream industry chain of intelligent aviation, seize the commanding heights of the global next generation of intelligent aviation.
Article/Liu Kuang public account, ID: Liukuang110