Colin Snow, is a drone industry analyst who has been following 72 different forecasts of the UAV field. However he disagrees with most of them. A lot of Drone Market researches estimates widely vary and have unclear sources. It is not easy to make a forecast for the drone industry. Snow agrees that the industry is growing fast now, but he also points out that the drone sales numbers don’t always equal numbers estimated by government agencies. According to Snow there’s a huge gap between actual commercial use and compliance with FAA regulations.
Analyst Colin Snow at AUVSI Xponential in May 2017. Jim Moore photo.
Drone hardware has a clear leader that most of you know about. Snow says: “More and more consumer drones are being used for commercial use. 72% of operators purchase DJI drones and 68% of those DJI customers are using their drone for commercial operations. ”
Snow says that one thing many analysts miss is the huge market of film/photo/video which makes up more than 40% of the market. After that, the top use cases are in surveying and terrain mapping, asset and infrastructure inspection, public safety and first responders, and agriculture.
Colin Snow has also mentioned than there is more potential for the industry to be released in public infrastructure, for example, as it offers a huge market – but can be slow to change the way that they do business and adopt new technology. Measuring both use case maturity and potential growth, insurance stands out as a major growth vertical.
