November 17 news: With the rapid growth of logistics express demand in China's consumer market, logistics drone field in the market is also becoming hot, and the two major platforms of e-commerce and logistics enterprises are speeding up the layout. And the news recently marks the beginning of a new stage in the UAV business, which has long been deadlocked.
The Northwest China Administration of Civil Aviation has announced that JingDong will be granted a drone license to explicitly include "logistics distribution (limited pilot enterprises)" business into the enterprise management project. This also means that JingDong officially became the world's first company to obtain terminal logistics UAV logistics and distribution business in provincial scope.
Looking back on JingDong's history of fighting in the field of logistics drones, as early as 2015, the company began to conduct UAV projects. JingDong's own development of the regional UAV, "Beijing-Hong unmanned cargo aircraft" has entered the stage of flight testing. It is reported that Liu Qiangdong had previously said that JingDong will build tens of thousands of drone airports across the country.
In late October last year, Cainiao's drone group made its first cross-sea flight in Fujian Province, completing online shopping and distribution for residents of coastal islands, and it is the first time in the country that a group of drones flew across the sea.
At present, Su Ning's terminal small UAV can be operated on a regular basis, branch and trunk UAVs are being developed and tested.
In fact, in 2013, e-commerce platform Amazon began to move into drone logistics, although it started early, but its development was not as lucky as JingDong. Amazon UAVs face policy regulation in the United States that is more difficult to solve than technical problems. As a result, Amazon's can not take a new step for its drone dream.
And with the issuance of business license, JingDong's unmanned distribution has finally become legalized. With the support of national policy, enterprises can also develop better. However, the development of UAV logistics still has many technical problems to be solved. In such a competitive environment, it is not clear who can laugh last.
