Author: Xin Yi (新一)
【Editor’s Note: Recently, The Financial Times claimed DJI executives were undergoing "military training," but netizens revealed it was a team-building event at a tourist site. This follows a history of U.S. efforts to undermine DJI, including a failed "Countering Chinese Drones Act." Despite such pressures, DJI, founded in 2006 by Wang Tao (汪滔), rose to dominate the global drone market. Wang's early passion for model aircraft evolved into a groundbreaking "helicopter flight control system" developed at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Faced with initial failures and near-bankruptcy, Wang persevered, adopting a perfectionist, hands-on leadership style. DJI shifted from selling drone parts to launching the iconic "Phantom" drone, setting new industry standards. By 2015, DJI’s consumer drones had become household names. Today, with 4,600 patents and customers in 100+ countries, DJI reigns supreme as a civilian drone leader, all while navigating ongoing U.S. scrutiny and trade restrictions.】
Recently, the venerable British business daily, The Financial Times (《金融时报》), released a video report asserting, with apparent conviction, that executives of the Chinese drone manufacturer DJI (大疆) were being “forced to undergo military training.”
Yet after internet users scrutinized the footage, they discovered that this so-called “Army Officers’ Academy” was, in fact, the Huangpu Military Academy Memorial (黄埔军校纪念馆), rated as a national 4A-level tourist site. In other words, the DJI staff’s visit had been nothing more than a corporate team-building exercise—not any form of military training.
This is hardly the first time foreign media has smeared DJI. Just a few months ago, some extremist American politicians even introduced a so-called “Countering Chinese Drones Act” (“反对中国无人机法案”) targeting DJI, vainly attempting to write a boycott of the company into U.S. law.
Ironically, because DJI’s products are irreplaceable in the U.S. market, this proposal failed to pass within their own legislative process, and the farce had to be abandoned.
Driven by a “hate by association” mentality, many foreigners hostile toward China have come to loathe Chinese brands like DJI with equal intensity. Yet the founder behind this brand, whom they admire and resent to their core, is, in fact, an “eighties-born” entrepreneur.
As a folk saying goes, “At forty-five, a person stands like a mountain tiger.” Now in the prime of his life, this founder still works on the front lines, leading a revolution in drone technology and ever-prepared to open a new era in aviation.
The founder of DJI is Wang Tao (汪滔), born in 1980 into a well-to-do, highly educated family. His parents placed great emphasis on his education.
From a young age, Wang Tao developed the habit of reading. Around the third grade, he came across a comic book called Grandpa’s Brain-Teasers (《动脑筋爷爷》), which featured adventures conducted via a red helicopter. From that moment on, Wang Tao became enthralled by model aircraft.
During his upbringing, Wang’s mother tried to cultivate interests like singing and dancing, but all these efforts proved futile.
When she saw her son suddenly fall in love with model aircraft, rather than discouraging him, she generously supported this passion. Even today, modeling aircraft is not a cheap hobby.
From then on, whenever she went on a business trip, Wang’s mother never failed to bring back various models for him. At sixteen, his father asked someone in Hong Kong to purchase a genuine remote-controlled helicopter as a gift.
In Wang Tao’s imagination, a true remote-controlled helicopter should be like a tiny sprite, able to hover motionless in midair and move anywhere at the pilot’s command.
But the expensive model he received fell far short of that vision, leaving him quite disappointed.
When it was time for university, Wang Tao enrolled in the electronics department at East China Normal University (华东师范大学), a field he found interesting.
Yet, after three years at university, he had barely encountered any drone-related knowledge. Thus, he resolutely chose to drop out.
At first, his parents strongly opposed this decision, advising that he should “waste” just one more year to graduate and then pursue his dreams in graduate school. But in the end, they could not sway their son.
After leaving East China Normal University, Wang Tao applied to renowned American universities like MIT, but his grades were not exactly stellar, and he faced relentless rejections.
Fortunately, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (香港科技大学) accepted him.
At HKUST, Wang Tao flourished. He participated in the National College Student Television Robot Competition (全国大学生机器人电视大赛) two years in a row.
During the competition, he developed a “helicopter flight control system,” which would later become the cornerstone of DJI’s success. Thanks to his remarkable performance, Wang Tao won the championship in the Hong Kong regional competition.
As he approached graduation, Wang Tao applied for HKD 18,000 in funding from his school to design a helicopter hovering system.
Enabling a helicopter to hover steadily in midair required accounting for factors like ground conditions, wind direction, and temperature, which is an extremely demanding challenge.
Sure enough, at the final demonstration, Wang Tao’s machine crashed.
Because of this failed graduation project, he received only a C grade, which means he not only lost the chance to study at a top European institution but also faced the risk of not graduating at all.
Luckily, a professor named Li Zexiang (李泽湘) saw great promise in Wang Tao’s work. With his recommendation, Wang Tao continued his studies as a graduate student at HKUST.
Over several university years, Wang Tao gradually realized that his career would not be learned—it had to be created by his own hands.
His persistence paid off: in graduate school, he assembled a drone prototype right in his dorm room.
The year 2006 arrived, and with two classmates in tow, Wang Tao returned to Shenzhen. In a roughly 20-square-meter storage room provided by his uncle, he founded what would become the world-famous DJI.
Yet 2006, the year DJI was established, also proved to be the darkest time in Wang Tao’s life.
Initially, money wasn’t an issue. He obtained 200,000 yuan from his family and subsequently landed several “big deals.”
For instance, he managed to sell his handmade drones to universities and large corporations at hefty prices.
However, with unHowever, at unit prices exceeding thousands of yuan, these products were hardly affordable to the general public.
In other words, DJI’s initial business model was severely distorted, and Wang Tao, as founder, saw no real path forward.
Besides external pressures, DJI also suffered internal woes.
Because Wang Tao was naturally decisive—some might say domineering—and often blunt in his speech, it was hard for others to communicate with him. His two startup partners left one after another.
Left to run things alone, Wang Tao soon recruited three like-minded young people.
The youngest of these three was still a senior in college.
Yet Wang Tao, far from lowering standards for these novices, insisted that as a startup, there would be no fixed working hours. They often labored more than a dozen hours a day.
Wang Tao himself preferred working at night, frequently starting at eleven or midnight and continuing straight through dawn.
Faced with this schedule, the three new employees found themselves in a bind. Whenever Wang Tao encountered a problem or had a spark of inspiration, he would call them immediately, never caring about the hour or that they might have just begun to rest after a long day.
His phone calls, piercing through the night, became a torment. To prevent the boss from calling, one clever employee would toss his phone into a metal box right after work, making it not merely unanswered but unreachable.
Wang Tao’s communication style inevitably evokes comparisons with the notoriously exacting Steve Jobs. Indeed, in his work, Wang Tao also embraces perfectionism.
Even when tightening a tiny screw, he had strict rules about how many fingers to use, how many turns to make, and how tight it should be.
Hundreds of screws on a single drone would be meticulously assembled this way.
Despite their pursuit of perfection, the drones’ lofty prices deterred buyers, and the company gradually lost business. By the end of 2006, DJI’s coffers had dwindled to a mere 20,000 yuan, and it was on the verge of bankruptcy.
At this critical juncture, a friend of Wang Tao’s father stepped in. This man, Lu Di (陆地), invested 500,000 yuan—DJI’s only infusion of external capital in its history—to save them from impending doom.
However, Lu Di’s arrival implicitly diluted the shares of the three young employees. Together with disagreements over the company’s direction, they left one by one, disintegrating the four-member founding team.
But just like the saying that “the same move cannot be used twice against a Saint Seiya,” when faced again with a talent shortage, Wang Tao learned how to cope.
He turned to his mentor, Professor Li Zexiang, who was then at Harbin Institute of Technology. Li encouraged his graduating students to join DJI. Additionally, Li arranged for a friend to provide Wang Tao with another one million yuan in capital.
Thanks to his teacher’s help, Wang Tao escaped a dire predicament. Soon after, he found a way to generate income. On various online forums, he noticed that model aircraft enthusiasts had a huge demand for drone parts.
Hence, DJI began selling components individually rather than as complete units.
Though it might sound lowbrow, this approach brought DJI a robust cash flow, ensuring Wang Tao no longer had to worry about funding.
If you look at DJI’s official website and examine the company’s timeline, you’ll notice that for its first five or six years, the company remained quiet. Apart from launching a few profitable flight-control components, it released no complete drone products.
In those early years, Wang Tao poured all his energy into perfecting the “intelligent flight control system.” This achievement not only fulfilled his childhood dream but also established DJI’s unique technological barrier.
In 2010, a Paris-based company called Parrot launched the world’s first consumer-grade drone. Parrot’s technological prowess was impressive: its drones later appeared at Apple product launches, and Apple even welcomed some of Parrot’s products into its official stores.
As competitors began rolling out products, DJI had to decide whether to continue selling parts or release its own complete drone.
As Wang Tao later recalled: “Our initial reason for launching our first product was to prevent competitors from starting a price war.”
In some sense, DJI was forced into the fray by its rivals. But thanks to its deep, specialized research and Wang Tao’s emphasis on industrial aesthetics, DJI’s first complete drone, the “Phantom” (“精灵”), debuted with maturity and technological sophistication that outstripped its competitors.
Over time, DJI widened the gap further. Wang Tao once offered a vivid comparison: “DJI took a high-performance, professional-grade product and brought it to a price range most people could accept, while our competitors simply took a flying toy and added a camera.”
This was indeed the case. Companies like Parrot repeatedly unveiled more portable, approachable, and amusing yet astronomically expensive products. DJI, on the other hand, pursued greater performance, longer battery life, and higher-definition imaging.
Ordinary consumers already found drones an elusive luxury; professional enthusiasts had no interest in the “toys” offered by Parrot and its peers.
As a result, for a host of reasons, competitors saw their market share shrink as DJI marched triumphantly toward becoming the industry’s undisputed leader.
Statistics show that DJI’s drone customers span over 100 countries worldwide. Technologically, it holds more than 4,600 patents and controls the product definitions and supply chain discourse in the drone industry.
In China, many people first heard of drones around early 2015, when the rock singer Wang Feng (汪峰) proposed to Zhang Ziyi (章子怡) using a “DJI Phantom 2” (大疆精灵二) drone.
This moment marked DJI’s official entry into the common household, essentially completing a “reverse encirclement” from professional users to the general public.
It’s lamentable that in 2019, the U.S. military chose Parrot—struggling in civilian markets—to produce military drones for NATO countries, allowing it to survive. Meanwhile, the Chinese brand DJI, which has always focused solely on the civilian sector and pledged never to involve itself in military production, has repeatedly been slandered and obstructed by the U.S. precisely because it sells too well.
Since 2016, the U.S. has imposed restrictions on DJI in multiple areas—markets, patents, and software—which have now lasted eight years.
Consider the American action camera giant GoPro. Before DJI released drones with integrated cameras, it considered partnering with GoPro. But GoPro demanded a lion’s share—two-thirds of the total profit.
Pushed to the brink, Wang Tao turned to local Chinese suppliers and found camera modules of equal quality, developing DJI’s own camera capabilities (by another account, camera R&D was always in Wang Tao’s plan). In this way, DJI elegantly sidestepped GoPro.
In a twist of fate, GoPro attempted to emulate DJI by launching its own drone, Karma. In Buddhism, “Karma” refers to cause and effect, and indeed, GoPro paid a price for its arrogance.
Because of design flaws and substandard quality, Karma performed poorly in the market and has long since been discontinued.
Industry rivals have repeatedly disassembled DJI drones, and the more they dissect, the more despair they feel. In a DJI drone, the only components costing more than ten dollars are the battery and camera, and 80% of the parts are generic.
A Japanese drone manufacturer lamented: “To build a product with the same functionality, our material costs alone are twice those of DJI.”
Because its products are so refined, global media and major investment institutions lavish praise on DJI.
Sequoia Capital lauded: “A DJI drone is as exquisite as a flying Apple computer.”
The Wall Street Journal proclaimed: “It’s so advanced it doesn’t seem like a Chinese company. This is a Chinese firm the world is trying to catch up with.”
This remark sounds grating—why can’t a Chinese company be advanced?
If Wang Tao initially built DJI through perseverance, scientific spirit, and boundless enthusiasm, then the greatness of “Made-in-China” made today’s DJI possible.
If Wang Tao had gone to MIT or smoothly entered a top European university for graduate studies—if he had founded his business in Europe or America—would DJI still be what it is today?
Wang Tao once said that Shenzhen provides DJI with unrivaled conditions: the world’s best supply chain division of labor and the world’s finest engineers are in Shenzhen. His subtext is clear: Shenzhen made DJI.
Wang Tao is a low-profile, somewhat mysterious figure. He wears round-framed glasses and a goatee, projecting a cultured aura. Yet, the sign on his office door reads “Only bring your brain” and “Do not bring emotions,” revealing his still-fierce temperament, ever intolerant of fragile egos.
He still works more than eighty hours a week, and now that DJI has 4,000 employees, he continues to labor meticulously, day and night.
DJI’s slogan is “The Future of Possible” (“未来无所不能”). Wang Tao is striving with all his might today to realize an unlimited tomorrow.
References:
[1] Celebrity Biographies · Wealth Figures | Wang Tao: Boundless Skies for DJI (名人传记·财富人物丨汪滔：大疆无疆)
[2] Business Celebrity | Wang Tao’s Ground-Level Flight (商界明星丨汪滔贴地飞行)
[3] China Business Journal | The Alternative Rise of the “Drone King” DJI (中国经营报丨“无人机之王”大疆的另类崛起)
[4] Zuolin Youli | The Drone World and the First Half of Wang Tao’s Life (左林右狸丨无人机江湖和汪滔的前半生)
December 17, 2024 (2024年12月17日)
Chinese Authors’ Group (华人作者团)
Chinese Entrepreneurs Series No. 50 (华人企业家系列50)
This translation is an independent yet well-intentioned effort by the China Thought Express editorial team to bridge ideas between the Chinese and English-speaking worlds. The original text is available: Original Chinese Authors’ Group (华人作者团), The Most Chinese (最华人)
Kindly attribute the translation if referenced.