KUALA LUMPUR: Aerodyne Group, Malaysia’s homegrown artificial intelligence-driven drone service provider, aims to become the world’s top drone service provider next year with a better revenue contribution from overseas.
Founder and group CEO Kamarul A. Muhamed said the group is growing by leaps and bounds, being ranked third in the Drone Service Provider Ranking 2019 Report by Germany-based commercial drone industry research group, Drone Industry Insights (DRONEII).
In 2018, Aerodyne Group was placed seventh in the report, which uses company size, market shares and public attention as key ranking parameters.
“Our global expansion has been very strong where we just closed one acquisition in the US and will have more coming from other parts of the world.
“To be the world’s number one is not easy because our competitors are well funded. If Aerodyne were based in the US, we would have been able to grow faster with better funding and ecosystem, but we are proudly Malaysian.
“Despite a lot of challenges, we’ve improved significantly,” he told Bernama, adding that the group would ride on a massive overseas expansion plan going forward as demand in the market is increasing, especially from the public sector.
Kamarul said over 60% of the group’s revenue currently is derived locally while the rest is from markets such as Australia, Denmark, the UK and South America.
He said the group plans to strengthen its position in existing markets, namely the US, India, Japan and Indonesia, while venturing into new markets such as China.
“China is a very big market. In the past, it was very risky for us to enter the country due to its intellectual property protection (restriction) but we have managed to solve that problem.
“We were doing business on a small scale previously, but now we are going bigger. In three years, Malaysia’s (contribution to our revenue) will be less than 10%,” he said.
Kamarul said Aerodyne is planning an initial public offering three years from now, eyeing foreign stock exchanges that offer better valuations, particularly those in Japan and the US.
“We are looking at a bigger and active market. These two markets (Japan and the US) are currently very receptive to new technology,” he said.
The Aerodyne Group has recently acquired a 60% controlling interest in US-based company, Measure UAS Inc, to serve enterprise clients in North America.
At present, the group manages more than 400,000 infrastructure assets with 80,000 flight operations across 25 countries and surveyed in excess of 70,000 km of power infrastructure across 25 countries globally. – Bernama
