On November 6, Dajiang, a local innovative enterprise in Shenzhen, ushered in its 13th birthday.

In the previous half month, DJI and its founder Wang Tao were all famous on the list of Hurun Research Institute, during which time they also released products Mavic Mini and plant protection drone T20 to celebrate their birthday.

Reviewing the history of Xinjiang, there are all kinds of unique experiences encountered in the dormant period of the previous few years and the rapid development period in the following years. In fact, the history of DJI is also the history of Wang Tao's struggle. Let's take a look at the unusual entrepreneurial process of Wang Tao, the founder of DJI.

Red helicopter cartoon

In 1980, Wang Tao was born into a wealthy family in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. My father is an engineer and my mother is a teacher.

Wang Tao's obsession with the sky began in primary school. One day, he read a comic book, "Grandpa use your head", which depicts a red helicopter, which tells the story of red helicopter exploration. Less than 10 years old, he was so attracted that he began to imagine the sky. He hoped that he could make an identical helicopter and travel with him.

In 2001, he was admitted to the Electronics Department of East China normal University, but in his junior year, he chose to drop out and instead send applications to world-famous universities such as Stanford and MIT. However, he was repeatedly rejected because his grades were only above average and not very good.

After the dream of a top university was shattered, he entered the Department of Electronic Engineering of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.During his undergraduate course, he continued to indulge in his aviation dream and participated in two robot competitions, which won the champion of Hong Kong and tied for third place in the Asia-Pacific region. He broke several models along the way, and the rotating propeller blade left a scar on his hand, but it gave him the idea of making something that could automatically control the flight of the helicopter.

So in 2005, when Wang Tao was preparing for his graduation project at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, he decided to study the flight control system of remote control helicopters. Since few undergraduates can decide the direction of the graduation project themselves, most of them are assigned by their mentors. However, he was so determined that he found two classmates to persuade the teacher to agree with their research direction.

Under his soft and hard entanglement, the mentor finally relaxed and agreed. To this end, he applied for a funding of HK $18000 for the school. During this period, he skipped classes and stayed up until 5: 00 a. M. every day, a situation that lasted for five months.

However, at the time of the demonstration, the plane still fell out of the air. The automatic hovering technology, which wanted to solve the flight control problem at the age of 16, "can stay in the air and park wherever you want" ended in failure.

In the end, he barely got a C in his graduation project.

But it was not without gains. He attracted the attention of Li Zexiang, a professor of robotics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Study and start a business

Under the introduction of Li Zexiang, he began to be a two-year graduate student in 2006.

At the same time, while he was studying while opening a company, he and two classmates took the 2 million Hong Kong dollars they had raised and went to the Sunshine Golf Building in Chegongmiao, Shenzhen, a warehouse of less than 20 square meters to set up DJI Innovations. According to the recollection, "oblique, not very high, a very small open space, 20 square meters do not know if there is, is a very small warehouse, at that time the three of us crowded into it." "

Also because of frequent absenteeism, two years of postgraduate courses, he studied for a full five years to get a degree.

At the beginning, Wang Tao didn't have a big vision. "I didn't know how big the market would be," he recalled. Our idea is also simple: develop a product that can support a team of 10 to 20 people. "therefore, all the scholarships won by Wang Tao University are used for research, and the cost of living depends on the remaining scholarships of the other two students.

However, due to the early lack of vision, coupled with Wang Tao's strong personality and a very picky perfectionist, when he moved the company to Lianhua North Village, he was the only one left in the original class. The two students who started their business together, one studying abroad and the other working, have left Dajiang.

Wang Tao can only keep recruiting people from the Internet, and even make phone calls everywhere. Worst of all, the company can't recruit good people at all. Because when the man came, as soon as the door opened, he saw that it was a small workshop and basically turned around and left.

Fortunately, out of his interest in innovative technology, Wang Tao found people of the same kind and formed a team of four with Lu Zhihui, Chen Chuqiang and Chen Jinying. Of the four members of the team, only Wang Tao has a background in drone technology, so Wang Tao plays the role of a mentor and often needs to teach others hand in hand.

At that time, there was no business model in DJI, which was to make products. After the products came out, they were peddled in domestic and foreign aircraft model enthusiasts' forums such as "I love model". The whole team is like a laboratory in a university, with no title to each other, several people huddled in the same room, working more than ten hours a day, no time to commute, and many things are chatted while repairing drones.

What scares other members most is Wang Tao's phone. Wang Tao prefers to work at night and doesn't work until 11: 00 or 12: 00 in the evening until the day. Most importantly, he often regardless of time, whenever he has an idea, he calls to talk about it. To this end, they each have their own ways to deal with this. After work, some people put the phone in an iron box so that it cannot be connected; some people turn it off directly; of course, some people dare not answer it. So, basically, when Wang Tao can't find two of them, he will call the last one.

Dajiang's first product sold for 50, 000 yuan at a cost of only 15000. For more than two years, DJI operated in a small workshop.

Multiple choice question

Two years after the founding of DJI, almost all the members of the founding team left. Lu Zhihui, Chen Chuqiang and Chen Jinying respectively set up or joined drone startups after leaving DJI, and eventually became Wang Tao's competitors. Later, his mentor Li Zexiang joined in, not only bringing funds, but also introducing many of his students to Dajiang.

Soon after, DJI polished the XP3.1 flight control system, which fulfilled Wang Tao's wish of automatically hovering, and the flight test was conducted at Rongbu Temple in Tibet, the highest temple in the world, just 20 kilometers from the north slope of Mount Qomolangma. Taking off at an altitude of 5000 meters, this is the first time in human history that aerial robots have been used for flight tests and aerial photography experiments in the Everest area. The unmanned helicopter, named Mount Everest, can fly with a semi-automatic remote control with a control radius of about 1 km, as well as a fully autonomous flight at a navigation point with a range of 10 km.

It can be said that at this point, DJI created the first miracle.

Subsequently, DJI successively launched "ACE ONE helicopter flight control", "Wukong multi-rotor flight control" and other aircraft control systems, ushering in the first ray of dawn.

In 2010, information received from a New Zealand agent-"she sells 200 balance rings a month, but 95% of customers install balance rings on multi-axis aircraft", DJI is faced with two choice questions: one is to continue to sell accessories or to do the whole machine; second, if you do the whole machine, it is to do fixed wings, helicopters, or multi-axes.

The company exploded for this, because there was no reference sample at that time, I didn't know what it would look like to do the whole machine, and I couldn't see the prospect of doing multi-axis at all, so it was very risky.

Finally, Wang Tao patted the board domineering: do multi-axis.

In fact, at that time, the small workshop model in Dajiang also made a lot of money. The products were mainly sold to state-owned enterprises, and the demand of the latter to buy products was mainly to demonstrate to the leader. "they bought a machine, and we sent a group of people to show it to him." then the leader put it on the shelf after watching it, and they gave us 200000 yuan. "

In Wang Tao's words, it was easy money, but he was afraid that the company's hope of becoming bigger would be ruined on this kind of easy money, so he immediately cut this way. "it's not in my direction," he said. I am the person who makes the product, I just want to make the product well so that more people can use it. "

By 2012, with the mature technology accumulated over the past few years, DJI had all the elements needed for a complete drone: software, propellers, brackets, balance rings and remote controls. Finally, the "Dajiang Elf" was released in January 2013, which successfully pried the civilian drone market. Subsequently, "genie 2" and "genie 3" came out one after another, quickly occupying 70% of the market share.

Only brains, no emotions.

In the early days of the company, Wang Tao asked employees to write the Times to report what they did every hour, which was unbearable for most people. Because of this, Wang Tao once said frankly, "I am a perfectionist, so it will cause a lot of friction when communicating with other people." "

In Li Zexiang's view, Wang Tao completely embedded the spirit of perfectionism into his product view, but this also brought him a lot of controversy.

A report on Lei Feng mentioned such a detail: Wang Tao has strict requirements on the tightness of a screw, and he tells employees to strive for perfection until they feel what it feels like with a few fingers.

Two lines of words are written on Wang Tao's office door-"only brains" and "no emotions". He is a fierce but practical leader who works more than 80 hours a week all the year round, with a single bed next to his desk.

When he is not satisfied with the employee's design, he will bluntly say, "what kind of rubbish is this?" "

Many people find Wang Tao's character unbearable, and he admits that perfectionism "often breaks the hearts of employees".

One former employee said, "it is really difficult for a glass heart to survive in DJI. "

Dajiang insists on a work mode of rapid elimination. The company encourages employees to work overtime and directly dismiss employees with poor performance. This kind of work mode seems to be very impersonal, but on the other hand, it has also developed a sense of fierce competition among employees.

In 2015, when Dajiang held the launch of the drone product "Elf 3" in New York, Wang Tao, as CEO and CTO, did not come as promised, simply because "the product is not as perfect as he thought."

Before and after this, DJI's success once made drone entrepreneurship hot, and some companies are also trying to illegally steal the design of DJI drones. Wang Tao has handled internal employee leaks, with one employee who left because he did not get enough shares to sell fake DJI flight controllers and another who sold DJI's design drawings to competitors.

For Wang Tao, who has a surplus of perfectionism and is forced to rely on employees, after experiencing leaks, this mistrust caused by perfectionism has gradually turned into mistrust caused by integrity issues.

In order to prevent sensitive information from leaking again, Wang will separately distribute work phones to internal employees and exercise strict control over their computers and emails. According to China Entrepreneur, an employee who has worked in Dajiang for many years talked about his departure experience. "I received a resignation notice from the company around 9: 00 in the morning, and then I found that my computer and email could no longer be accessed. I didn't even sign the departure agreement at that time. "

In the view of Lu Chih-hui, a partner who co-founded DJI with Wang Tao, he always thought that it was because Wang Tao's rich family allowed him to concentrate on research and development without making a profit for a year, and if he was not satisfied with it, he would not sell it. That's why he has today's technology reserve. But later he traced back to the growth path of DJI and found that DJI was not only relying on the strength of the family from the very beginning. Wang Tao was very prescient and introduced a large number of external resources, such as the addition of mentor Li Zexiang, which not only brought money. "also introduced a lot of technical personnel for DJI," Wang Tao knows how to do this thing, and he knows how to use resources to keep doing the right thing. "

Compared with the glory of his career, his personal remarks are often unexpected and have the effect of "not shocking people to death". Some people think he's arrogant.

In public, he said bluntly that the world was incredibly stupid: "after work, I found that there are too many unreliable people and things. This society is so stupid, including many very famous people, or people who used to be gods and now regard them as gods. In fact, the level is not high. I often doubt myself, aren't you a little out of your mind? I question myself all the time if I am out of my mind, but I still find that the world is stupid. "

In his mouth, there is no one in the world that he really admires. Great as Jobs, he can only be regarded as "appreciative".

But besides himself, there is another wise man in Wang Tao's eyes. The company founded by this man is "better than any Internet company and better than Apple Inc, because he is a person who really focuses on making products," he wrote on moments. What Wang Tao is talking about is Ren Zhengfei of Huawei.

The reason why he is optimistic about Ren Zhengfei is that Wang Tao also has an almost abnormal "perfectionism complex" for products.

Wang Tao's studies were not excellent when he was in college. "I don't know whether Wang Tao is smarter than others. However, people with excellent academic achievements do not necessarily stand out at work. "this is what Li Zexiang said.

In 2018, Li Zexiang and Wang Tao also won the 2019IEEE Robotics and Automation Award, one of the most important awards in the global engineering field. Li Zexiang and Wang Tao are the first Chinese scholars and entrepreneurs to win the award.

Thirteen years have passed quietly since 2006. This is born in Shenzhen less than 20 square meters of private housing enterprises, the reason why the tentacles can be extended to the world, to be unrivalled, can not be separated from Wang Tao's obsession with product quality.

Cracks in development

In January 2013, DJI officially launched consumer-grade multi-rotor Phantom. Before everyone played multi-rotor is DIY type, users use this rack and that one's flight control to hang that family's head, and DJI put all these together. Wang Tao himself is a person who attaches great importance to industrial aesthetics. DJI invested in ID design a long time ago, so the Phantom 1 generation was quite amazing on the product.

What is amazing is its price. When doing helicopter flight control, Wang Tao has started flight control, head and picture projects for aerial photography, and even accessories such as motors are made by himself. In addition, after the launch of iPhone, the price of the sensor has dropped rapidly, and the price of the drone in DJI has reached 1000 US dollars, so it has been highly concerned by aircraft model enthusiasts as soon as it is launched.

The advent of Phantom has achieved a higher market response than Zen head. At that time, DJI thought that the order of 3000 units in the first month was over, but it was unexpected that it had ordered more than 10,000 units in the first place.

Phantom 1 is recommended by GoPro in the demo video (GoPro has been recommended by default since DJI), but there is no integrated camera. If you want to install GoPro, you have to weld it on the head of DJI. Almost everyone thinks that DJI + GoPro is a match made in heaven.

According to Wang Tao himself, Phantom 2 was originally branded to GoPro, and according to the original plan was to integrate the camera into it, but in the end, it didn't talk about it, just left an interface on the head, and players can install GoPro on their own.

It was because of Phantom 2 that Wang Tao fell out with Colin, general manager of DJI North America.

In 2011, Wang Tao met Colin Quinn, a Texan, at a radio-controlled helicopter conference in Muncie, Indiana. Colin is an aerial clap hand, has his own aerial photography business company, is also a user of DJI.

In August of that year, Colin flew to Shenzhen to meet Wang Tao again. At that time, the first prototype of the Yuntai Z15 developed by DJI for the sports camera GoPro had just been made, and Wang Tao demonstrated it to Colin and surprised him on the spot.

Colin immediately said that to cooperate deeply with DJI, Wang had a plan to set up a branch in North America, so he asked Colin to join the North American branch as the general manager in charge of operations, and gave the other North American branch a 48% stake.

Colin, a marketing genius, put forward the slogan "omnipotent in the future" for DJI and used the star resources he accumulated in variety shows such as "extreme Challenge" to promote Zen and Phantom on social media such as Facebook Inc. Colin's social marketing makes the user group of Dajiang break the boundary of aircraft model enthusiasts, and the general public also begin to pay attention to the products of Dajiang.

It is also Colin's relationship to know and plan to cooperate with GoPro. Phantom 2 to GoPro OEM label Wang Tao also agreed, but in the specific negotiations, the GoPro side offered to take 2/3 of the profits, Colin agreed to this unequal deal without authorization, which made Wang Tao unacceptable and terminated the cooperation with GoPro. As a result, Phantom 2 did not appear as deeply bundled with GoPro as expected.

One point of view is that because of the failure of cooperation with GoPro, Wang Tao decided to make his own camera, but in fact, camera research and development has always been in Wang Tao's plan, and Phantom 2 originally planned to label and cooperate with GoPro.It's just that Colin's behavior made Wang Tao realize that the American who helped him expand the US market was not completely under Wang Tao's control, and what made Colin lose points was that Colin claimed to be the CEO of DJI on social software such as linkin, while the truth is that Colin was just the CEO of DJI's North American subsidiary, which together made Wang Tao decide to merge the North American subsidiary into the parent body by way of stock exchange.

As a result, there was a very different valuation negotiation. Wang Tao could not remember clearly the specific shares discussed by the two sides at that time, but it was certain that there was a big gap. It is said that Colin's condition is that Wang Tao can give him 16% of the shares of DJI's parent company. its basic algorithm is that DJI North American market accounts for 30% to 40% of the sales revenue, and the subsidiary accounts for 48%. In this way, 16% of the shares make sense. Wang Tao's share proportion is 0.3%, and the high-level rights and interests that a DJI executive can correspond to. In Wang Tao's view, although Colin has made great contribution to expanding the market, But in essence, he is only the marketing person in charge of a regional market, and he is not the second person besides Wang Tao that Colin thinks in his heart.

The two sides broke up in discord.

At the end of 2013, Wang Tao locked all the email accounts of the employees in the North American branch, dismissed most of the employees, and redirected all North American customer orders to the headquarters in China. In early 2014, Colin immediately launched a counterattack, taking Dajiang to court.

Of course, Colin also has cards in his hand, that is, DJI's channels in North America were established by Colin, because of differences and lawsuits, DJI's goods in various channels in North America were sealed and could not be transferred. There are also many negative voices in the US media, which will naturally affect the income of DJI, as well as the entry of external investors and internal morale. Wang Tao also broke the rule of not seeing the media during that period and began to accept some interviews from foreign media, which was also forced by Colin's lawsuit.

In August 2014, after half a year of lawsuit, Colin and DJI reached an out-of-court settlement and received $10 million. According to the valuation of US $1.5 billion that Sequoia entered Dajiang that year, this price is basically in line with Wang Tao's psychological expectations.

Let college engineers be stars

In 2014, Moritz, a Sequoia global partner, visited DJI to discuss investment in DJI and asked a question: what can I do for Sequoia in DJI? This is a common question for investors to peddle themselves and win the initiative in negotiations, and basically they all fall into the foothold of government relations, market expansion, and talent recruitment. Wang Tao's answer surprised other people in Sequoia Capital China's industry.I want to be the most influential robot competition in the world. What do you think of Sequoia?

In fact, at this time, Dajiang is just the initial stage of the transformation of multi-rotor aerial drone, just launched its own multi-rotor aerial drone elf "Phantom 2," while Wang Tao insists on doing a robot competition that seems to have no return at such a critical period of rise, which is incomprehensible to many people. Actually, he's already on the move.

As early as 2013, DJI tried to hold a small robot competition, a summer scientific research activity tailored for science and engineering students and robot enthusiasts in the form of a summer camp. The participating students conducted an one-month project training at the DJI headquarters, guided and grouped by professors and industry elites of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and finally verified their own research results among the groups. Among them, students with outstanding performance have the opportunity to enter DJI to become R & D engineers or full scholarships of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

According to Wang Tao, this activity is a good social practice, much like entrepreneurship, with technical research and development, team management, and specific tactics and strategies. As a result, some master's degree graduates are not necessarily better than reliable undergraduate students in this process of social practice, or even perform poorly in some aspects. When he found this result, he looked a little proud, because it further confirmed his firm position that true knowledge comes from practice.

In 2015, the robot competition RoboMaster hosted by Dajiang officially became a national open competition for college students across the country, affecting nearly 10,000 students from hundreds of colleges and universities across the country. RoboMaster has developed into a comprehensive competition in which almost half of the science and engineering students can find their places to play.

The traditional robot competition is so low that not many people are willing to watch the robot pile up boxes and jump rope in front of the TV. Over time, the robot competition has lost its mass base. Because of this, RoboMaster pays more attention to fun and good-looking, and the competition system is a new design of DJI's own, and it has been constantly adjusted and optimized over the past few years.

"We just want to do something new with our ingenuity in the real world. In fact, this thing itself is a feast for engineers and inventors. We live in a society where there is no shortage of entertainers and sports stars, but there is no one who can become a star by doing something reliable. When we turn on the TV, we still can't find an intellectual sports that can make engineers and inventors stars. I hope RoboMaster can create national idols like Yao Ming and Liu Xiang and produce respected inventors and entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs. Wang Tao said when talking about the original intention of founding RoboMaster.

Wang Tao participated in the RoboCon for two consecutive years when he was a student at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2004 and 2005. these experiences have had a profound impact on him because he led the development of a helicopter flight control system, which was the foundation on which he later founded DJI.

In the long run, Wang Tao hopes to make the game like Formula one racing, or even like the current football World Cup, into an influential technology event that will enable the pursuit of superior technology and creativity to become a popular trend.

Financing is also bidding.

In April 2018, many investors in the primary market were ignited by the maverick Wang Tao.

Daxian uses competitive bidding for financing, which has caused fierce competition among investment institutions. as the angel investors in DJI said, some people send money and give it several times, so don't be embarrassed.

DJI, a company that is too good to be like a Chinese company, investors are flocking to grab share, which is the result of the last game in the market. DJI's operating data for the past year are eye-catching: operating income in 2017 was 17.57 billion yuan, up 80% from the same period last year; net profit was 4.3 billion yuan, up 123% from the same period last year.

Dajiang has given a good forecast: from 2012 to 2021, the compound growth rate of operating income will be more than 90%, and the compound growth rate of net profit will be more than 70%.

According to Wang Tao, the latest round of financing in DJI has adopted a new architectural design. Investors must subscribe for a certain proportion of unyielding Class D common shares in order to qualify for Class B common shares. Class D shares are essentially "interest-free debt" and "stock options". They do not have the right to vote, while Class B can have the right to vote.

For DJI, this financing design on the one hand helps to screen out investors, on the other hand, it helps to reduce financing costs.

Wang Tao, a wise man, is familiar with the market rules: DJI is not worried that no one is interested at all, and investors gather when they hear the wind.

On April 3rd, more than 100 investment institutions tried to take part in the financing bid, each with a deposit of $100000. The results of the first round of bids were announced on April 5, and the total subscription amount was 30 times more than originally planned.

The first round of bidding with a maximum of US $500 million (the maximum amount invested by a single investment institution) resulted in an average category D / B subscription ratio of 1.29 category 1.

On the afternoon of April 15, DJI announced the latest progress of the second round of bidding: as of 15:30 on the same day, the average subscription ratio of Class D / B shares with a maximum of US $500m (the upper limit for individual investment institutions) was 1.61.

The dust of DJI financing has finally settled: the proportion of BRV D is 1RV 1.5. DJI did not choose 1.7, or even 2:1, but chose a more reasonable proportion and fewer institutional investors.

"We got an investment share of hundreds of millions of dollars. The above-mentioned investor said that two days ago, DJI sent an email to his company to confirm the subscription share, and he was surprised that the BRV D ratio was only 1.5. "DJI financing is not mercenary, but is carefully selecting investors. "the recognition of investment institutions in Dajiang depends not only on the strength of the investment institutions, but also on the ability to bring resources. For example, an investment institution can bring good sales to Dajiang in new areas.

"DJI has broken through the traditional 60-month industrial cycle and has a strong consumption attribute and creativity. Investors believe that for many years in China, they have not seen a technology company continuously double its turnover for many years, and its net profit is in line with a growth rate of 70%.

What makes investors feel more gratified is that after three years, DJI will choose to take 25 times PE to buy back B shares. This is a deal with a good chance of breaking even.

According to the financing rules of Xinjiang, the old financing shares are not allowed to be transferred and cashed out, and private transfer cannot change the equity relationship. DJI's move strongly guarantees the interests of the financiers of this round of 1 billion US dollars.

In the eyes of investors, investment DJI, in fact, is similar to participating in the fixed growth of listed companies, locking in a three-year investment time. Even better than Dingzeng, DJI is an excellent company, with investors roughly calculating that it earns at least 20% a year.

In the end, DJI made a compromise, selecting less than 20 investment institutions from hundreds of institutional investors and raising $1 billion one by one.

On the other hand, those investors who have been shut out have stepped up their efforts to contact selected institutions and look for opportunities to ask for the transfer of DJI equity shares. DJI equity financing is still hot.

After this round of financing, the official valuation of DJI is $16 billion, while the weighted equivalent valuation of IPO investors is about $16.5 billion.

This extraordinary way of financing, bidding, was a success in the dispute.

According to public information, Dajiang initially conducted four rounds of financing, with a total financing of no more than 200 million US dollars, including Sequoia Capital China, Zhongheng Xingguang, far-sighted Capital, McStar Investment and so on.

The most recent Accel Partners investment was in 2015, raising just $75 million. After the financing of 1 billion US dollars was reached, it became the largest amount of financing in the history of Dajiang.

Wang Tao's maverick and Xinjiang's wolf nature culture play a role in the enterprise.

DJI's reward for employees is also simple, direct and rude. A few years ago, DJI awarded luxury cars to outstanding employees: golf in 2012, Tesla, Inc. in 2014, Audi in 2015, BMW and Porsche in 2016.

Some insiders in Dajiang said that employees who do well can get dozens of months' salary for the year-end bonus, and some employees have received 40 months' salary.

Get to know the "monster" Hasu

On Aug. 23, 2018, DJI, which has no rival in the consumer drone field, once again changed its life, releasing the performance monster Mavic 2 Pro, which carries the legendary Swedish camera brand Hassel camera, once again refreshing the upper limit of people's perception of consumer drones.

Who's Hasu?

It was built in Sweden and has a history of 78 years. Volvo is known as the proud camera brand in Gothenburg, Sweden, and there is no shortage of cameras selling for more than 200000 yuan in its product line. Its technology and equipment have been used by NASA in the first human landing on the moon and many other missions belonging to the Apollo program.

How did DJI get close to the aristocrat Hasu?

Hasu has long been famous in the field of aerial imaging, and many photographers are disgusted by some stupid decisions, such as banning other companies from using other digital backs on Hasu cameras, otherwise they will have to pay license fees. In nearly a decade of turmoil in Hasu, competitive brands such as Sony Group Corp have easily won the market. Hasu's greatest value is its brand and years of technology accumulation in the camera field. Hasu has been looking for buyers since the beginning of the 21st century, the first being iMacon, a film scanner company. After that, Hasu was sold several times, during which time a CEO was replaced in almost two years. Between 2014 and 2015, Hasu was exposed to financial difficulties and could be acquired.

Hasu executives are said to have found some investors at first, but investors are reluctant to give money because they expect a return. After looking around and finding that there was not much choice, Hasu had to turn his eyes to the far east.

Unlike other investors in Hasu, DJI knows that Chinese consumers are rich and only buy the expensive ones, not the right ones. At present, in addition to maintaining the pace in the research and development of drones, DJI is obviously aware that drones still face many risks in the world, and drones have never been a rigid demand, and the consumer UAV market will eventually face the problem of saturation.

Smoothly into a chapter, it is inevitable to seek services other than drones. The launch of pan-head cameras with head in hand and mounted by drones one after another is the extension of the business under this crisis. But all these require technology. Hasu has patents and technology in the camera field, which is exactly what DJI needs.

So Dajiang decided to invest in Hasu and become a shareholder of Hasu.

On April 26, 2017, DJI DJI Innovations and Hasselblad jointly released the world's first 100-megapixel aerial photography platform.

However, this platform for surveying and mapping is not well known to the public, but the Mavic 2 Pro at the beginning amazed all professional photography enthusiasts, which is the crystallization of the most cutting-edge achievements in power-limited imaging science and DJI's stable intelligent flight technology.

Fight against corruption with heavy punches

On January 17, 2019, DJI employees suddenly received an internal announcement: the company has launched a heavy campaign against corruption and 45 people have been investigated and punished. In 2018, DJI is expected to lose more than 1 billion yuan due to internal corruption. This figure is nearly 1% of Xinjiang's annual net profit in 2017, and more than twice the year-end benefits of all employees in 2017.

Anti-corruption in the tech world is nothing new. Especially for electronic manufacturing enterprises, corruption in the supply chain is almost a common problem in the industry; and DJI has begun to make efforts in the field of industrial-grade UAV in recent years, and the diversification of the industrial chain has aggravated the risk of corruption. As early as 2014, DJI fired the entire purchasing department because of supply chain problems.

However, this corruption chain can still form a scale of more than a hundred people in Xinjiang, and extend a variety of factional struggles and "palace dramas", indicating that there are indeed major loopholes in the firewall and internal management of Daxi for a long time in the past.

From 2014 to 2015, Sequoia parachuted into a group of professional managers after investing in Xinjiang. Due to the emphasis on "setting up people according to things" in business management, but the supply of technical personnel in the early stage is too scarce, DJI must do the thing of "setting things according to people" in order to ensure the output of technology, and there is a great conflict between professional managers and DJI culture. As a result, these executives left one after another, and Wang Tao no longer set up "C O" within the company, advocating that those who have the ability should have the authority to mobilize resources and the management is extremely flat.

On Zhihu Inc., some former employees of Dajiang complained about Wang Tao, saying that he likes to hire young liberal arts students with college backgrounds such as Tsinghua University and Berkeley to do management, and let laymen lead experts. "if the layman doesn't understand technology, he engages in technological corruption."

On the one hand, there is high pressure on programmers, and there have even been accidents of sudden death of programmers working overtime, on the other hand, corruption in the supply chain for personal gain. It can be said that Xinjiang is on the verge of tearing apart its internal culture, and by 2018, strong men will have to break their wrists.

Wang Tao, CEO of DJI, is an entrepreneurial hero in the eyes of many people. This is not the first time Wang Tao has paid attention to the problem of supply chain, but in the long process of enterprise management, he has carried out a mediocre struggle.

In an exclusive interview with Forbes in 2015, Wang Tao mentioned that managing the purchasing department in DJI is a big problem. "the most serious problem in the supply chain is kickbacks. Our purchase volume is as high as tens of millions of yuan a month, even if the purchasing staff only get 1% rebate, which is still a large number. "

Since then, Dajiang introduced procurement competition and other systems to solve some of the problems existing in the company's procurement. Four years later, there is still a fire in the backyard.

Wang Tao, an engineer, attaches great importance to research and development. DJI self-built manufacturing system, the original intention is not to control costs, but when the industrial chain is not mature enough, to meet the technical requirements of DJI some manufacturing links, can only be done on their own. For Dajiang factories, how to control costs is not the biggest challenge, the key is how to control flexibility, can quickly adjust the production of different products, and continue to improve quality. To be flexible means not to trample the cost to the end.

Since its founding, Wang Tao is almost the only decision maker from product design to internal management. According to Dajiang employees, "the company often works overtime because of a demand from Boss Wang, and the development team even works overtime until 4: 00 in the morning." However, while attaching importance to research and development, the system construction is not synchronized.

After issuing the anti-corruption announcement, some employees "involved in the case" shouted to Wang Tao through the media: "more than half of the people on the corruption list of the announcement are wronged, and those who are labelled are in order to hand over jobs to you?" It was also reported that when leaders went to give anti-corruption lectures to each project team, they asked each project to give a quota (corruption). In this regard, the DJI side did not respond.

In fact, giants such as BAT have always attached great importance to anti-corruption and supervision mechanisms. For example, JD.com has a Ministry of Supervision, BABA has a Ministry of Integrity, Baidu, Inc. has a Ministry of Professional Ethics Construction, Tencent has a special anti-fraud team and a Ministry of Supervision, and other major companies also have corresponding functional organizations and departments. These departments are often independent of other business departments, directly under the group headquarters, with a high degree of independence, can directly carry out investigations without going through the leadership of the relevant business units, and can report directly to the top management. However, it seems that DJI did not perform this function well in the past.

In a message to new employees, Wang wrote: DJI is a pure land, only pure entrepreneurs and artists born for their dreams. To some extent, this is the fundamental reason why Xinjiang can stand out, and now it seems that idealism needs to pay a realistic price.

On the track of drones, there is no doubt about the status of Dajiang as a giant. The local drone manufacturer from Shenzhen, with excellent product and technology research and development, has long occupied more than 70% of the global consumer drone market and continues to expand its boundaries. The products of "Made in China" have already spread all over the world, but there are very few Chinese technology brands that can be recognized by the world. In all kinds of unicorns, DJI is always at the top of the list, but it still has a long way to go to become a real "giant".

The competitors of DJI

Today, DJI is still the dominant consumer UAV market, with a huge market share. In the UAV field, its competitors have bypassed the consumer market and started from other segments to gain a foothold in the market.

After Xinjiang monopolized the consumer UAV market, Yihang was forced to transform, and the consumer UAV market was gradually marginalized by Yihang. Instead, we will find another way to devote more resources to the development of 2B business at low altitude, including air traffic solutions, smart city management solutions, and aviation media solutions. On the evening of October 31st, Yihang submitted its prospectus to SEC and applied for listing on NASDAQ. Based on the precipitation of technology and the support of capital, Yihang has great potential in the low-altitude UAV market in the future.

Jifei Technology has been competing with DJI for the plant protection UAV market. As a large agricultural country, China has a great demand for scientific and technological products such as plant protection drones, which are specially for agriculture. Under this condition, the market prospect of plant protection drones is very broad.

After fierce struggle in recent years, there are only a few survivors in the competition of spraying pesticides with drones, among which Jifei Technology and DJI are among them. On November 5, when Dajiang Agriculture released the brand-new plant protection drone T20, at the same time, Jifei suddenly announced the launch of three new products on the official WeChat account at the same price, and the two companies adopted a dead-to-death strategy.

Historically, the two companies have often released new products one after another in a very short period of time, and the prices are also clinging to each other. The two companies are regarded as two leaders in the industry and are often compared. Industry insiders believe that each has its own advantages and it is difficult to distinguish between the advantages and disadvantages.

Zero intelligence control focuses on police security and surveying and mapping market. Zero learned from the dismal market sales of consumer drone Dobby, dormant for a year, "return to zero" to start again, launching a new product fixed-wing drone ZT-3V. This product eliminates the wings, reduces flight resistance, speeds up flight speed, and increases load capacity and endurance capacity.

Compared with the traditional layout of UAV in Xinjiang, Zero makes a comprehensive improvement of many existing problems of UAV. At present, DJI has invested in the security and surveying and mapping market, but the effect is not significant, and it has not yet formed a climate. If Zero Intelligence Control seizes the opportunity and takes advantage of the situation to firmly occupy the market of these two sub-industries, it may be expected to become a strong opponent of DJI.

In recent years, Dajiang has developed its own standards for aerial images, and its brief and unpleasant cooperation with GoPro has strengthened its belief in making its own imaging technology. The birth of this product Osmo Action obviously directly targets the product line of GoPro, and seems to compete with gopro in the field of motion cameras.

In the field of head stabilizers, companies such as Feiyu, Zhiyun, Devil's claw, and so on, have become red with DJI.

Xinjiang 13 years of development road, there has been the most exciting part, there has also been a downturn, and finally stood in the position of industry leaders, closely related to their own strength. But for the current Xinjiang, with the ability to be a pioneer in the industry, it is bound to bear the pressure brought by the vanguard. If there is no breakthrough in its own technological innovation ability, the road of commercialization will be difficult to expand. With the rise of other enterprises, Dajiang is likely to be overtaken by bends. In order to stabilize the position of the leader, Wang Tao and his big frontier still face an uphill battle that must be fought, and only by winning the tough battle can they continue to stand at the top of the industry.