Most countries consider the UAV market and related development and sales as one of the key components of GDP growth. The drone market value is estimated at 22 billion USD in 2020 and is expected to grow almost twice by 2025 ^[1]. This is mostly related to the recent R&D and technology progress, once the implementation of the tasks requiring a high level of autonomy became possible and affordable.

At the moment, we somehow observe in many developed countries the saturation of the drone operators for popular tasks like video filming, movies, in general, those requiring RC. Yet the market opens for fully autonomous systems, and it is also possible, because of the ongoing regulations and standardization on the use of the air space by autonomous UAVs, including Europe-wide standardization (see the chapter on regulations).

Interestingly, the Fortune Business Insights reports on drone software market size to be around 6bln USD by 2027 (1.2bln USD in 2019). As the driving factor, the report mentions increased adoption of AI (Artificial Intelligence) in both drone operations and data processing, grabbed by UAVs ^[2].

This optimistic growth is affected by the following factors:

• Lack of worldwide (as in case of passenger planes) regulations on the airspace use, communication equipment, and utilities for autonomous flights: many individuals and companies defer the decision to buy UAV hardware, considering future incompatibility of their purchase with coming regulations, unknown at the moment.
• Large market fragmentation: with some leaders (i.e. DJI for commercial and recreational devices) and other competing companies, trying to find a niche.
• COVID outbreak, that affects delivery chain thus hardware availability (on the other hand, COVID outbreak caused demand on contactless delivery, where drones fit perfectly).

In general, it seems that in most countries, the market for skilled UAVOs, using RC-only flying modes is rather saturated. However, we predict the demand for new positions with a requirement to handle drone operations with a high level of autonomy. Those positions will naturally expand from the manual (RC) only UAVOs, along with the growing complexity of the operations. This applies straightforwardly to the drone utilities and services sector, including specialized drone constructions and the growth of universal platforms that can be converted virtually to any requirement, not only, i.e. different types of cameras but also several sensors and actuators.

We also predict that growth will happen if software houses, delivering navigation solutions for autonomous flights, integrating drones with U-Space (universal airspace where all flying objects can avoid collisions, the best, automatically), enabling precision maneuvering that is computer vision-based.

At the moment, the hardware commercial drone market seems to be dominated by Chinese manufacturers, in particular by DJI (about 70% of the commercial market, as of October 2020). Other manufacturers focus on the niche solutions, eventually are trying to compete in the limited range, like, i.e. solutions for professionals and the semi-professionals, as in the case of Yuneec. For this reason, commercial drone hardware manufacturing is hard to compete, so it is possible to launch a new business for a niche, industrial solutions.