The Drone Age : Can Indonesia Take Benefit ?
TIME magazine this week raised a special report about drone. It took poin of view from many perspectives of this technology ; entertainment, research, surveillance, search and rescue, and so on. This report showed that drone in this era will be part of our daily life. Drone doesn’t only mean tool but also technology that will revolutionate what the technology is existing today. For example in entertainment. Like Stephanie Zacharek wrote in TIME (31/5/2018), drone creates significant savings. A founding partner of drone cinematography company Aerial MOB, Tony Carmean, estimated that if helicopter can cost a filmmaker from $20,000 to $40,000 for a 10-hour day shoot, using drone spends cost for $4,500 to $13,000 a day only, including crew, equipment and insurance.
In the past, drone was only used for military purpose but now it is to be commercial. Teal Group and BI Intelligence predicts market for drone for civilian approximately 3,3 billion dollars whereas it is less than 500 million dollars in 2015. Radiantinsights.com estimates that commercial drone globally worth 609 million in 2014 and will reach 4.8 billion dollar in 2021. Even the market opportunity for drone is high but it will be dominated by global players that nowadays successfully take majority of market. As reported by The Economist (8/6/2017), civilian drone will be dominated by SenseFly (Switzerland) for EBEE, DJI (China) for MAVIS, DJI (China) for PHANTOM, Yuneec (China) for TYPHOON, and DJI (China) for MATRICE. For military drone, RQ-20B PUMA will be produced by AeroVironment (USA), MQ-9 REAPER (General Atomics, USA), and RQ-4A GLOBAL HAWK (Norhrop Grumman, USA). BI Intelligence reported that DJI, a Chinese brand, gained a 75 % share of the US commercial drone market in 2016.
Market Opportunity
McKinsey&Company in 2016 exclusively reported that several sectors will have potency for drone market in Indonesia. In mining, drone will be used to monitor environment for example air quality, temperature, and weather to optimize daily works. In farming, drone is used for surveillance and to update real-time weather in an integrated farming system. Both of that are service business that use drone. According to business landscape, drone related industry includes other three ; drone as product, software like operation system, system management, and analytics, and enabling component like vision, navigation, powerchips, and propulsion. So, another market opportunity is still there even not as many as drone for service.
Indonesia has been experiencing with drone for along time. For example, as written by Nugraha et.al. (2016) in Indonesia Law Review, Wulung, a drone that was developed by Indonesian Center for Research and Technology (BPPT) has been used by several ministries for monitoring illegal logging and illegal fishing, active volcano, and forest fires since 2013. Another government programs are Indonesian tax office uses drones to track and survey palm-oil plantations and miners. Beside that, Indonesian National Police uses drones for traffic monitoring in Jakarta during the month of Ramadhan and Eid. The examples above is usage of drone for government programs. Civilian programs that use drone are described in same source. It reported that a group of researchers in Sumatera used drones to monitor the habitats of orangutans, BPPT used quadcopters for monitoring Mount Sinabung, an active volcano in the North Sumatera, and drone was used by Dayak Tribe to gather proof against illegal palm oil companies.
From Where We Start
The other uses of drone are highly expected to raise big benefit for national economy. Our Government must think how to take benefit from this technology. Recently, Government through ministry of industry established a road map “Making Indonesia 4.0” to give direction and strategy to grab opportunity in this new era. Five sectors become priority : food and beverage, textile and clothes, automotive, chemical, and electronic. Although drone is not mentioned to be priority, this robot is potentially used for all the sectors. Like what INCIBE said in an article “Robots and drones in the industry 4.0” (20/7/2017), drone in industry 4.0 will have utility and versatility in various industrial sectors like energy, transportation, civil engineering works, and others.
We should not stop only in the road map and let the market move alone. Government with all stakeholders like business, research center, university, house representative, cultural institution and so on must collaborate to discuss about this. Grabbing market is not easy moreover now we head to head with global players like what I mentioned before. So we must create a proper strategy. Several agendas we can create then : First, mapping our domestic players. From four parts of landscape (service, drone as product, software, and enabling component), to where we will focus. For example, we have competitive players in drone creator and service and now condition is still a small company, in five years later we commit to make them scale up and grow to be big company.
Second, prioritizing what sectors we will lead. It is impossible to grab all market from all the landscape, so we must focus in part that we can be leader. The priority is based on market, our domestic players, and competitor. The last is regulation. Business in technology can not be submitted to the market, it needs intervention of Government by its regulation. Products protection is one way to make regulation work, another way is giving captive market to the domestic players like what several ministries had done with BPPT’s drone, Wulung, to help their programs. Finally, by all this things we hope that Indonesia can take opportunity in era of industry 4.0 by being a player, not just a consumer.
*) Uruqul Nadhif is a researcher in Center of Knowledge for Business Competitiveness (CK4BC), School of Business and Management ITB
