The government has also announced policies to promote the use of modern agricultural machinery. These include subsidies to encourage the use of drones in agriculture.

Apart from farm-sector drones, DJI has unveiled the Matrice 200 drone series, designed for professional use. Its applications are in aerial inspections and data collection from offshore oil rigs, wind turbines, power lines, telecommunication towers and bridges.

"Drones have quickly become a standard part of the enterprise toolkit for sophisticated tasks such as bridge inspections, land surveys and search-and-rescue missions," said Paul Guo, director of Enterprise Solutions at DJI.

"Applications in industry are beneficial for DJI to improve its technology, and its success in the consumer drone market will help the company to further widen its industrial application fields," said Pan Xuefei, a senior analyst at market research firm International Data Corp.

Xaircraft Technology Co Ltd, a Guangzhou, Guangdong province-based company, launched its latest agricultural drones－the P20 and P30－in December. Peng Bin, CEO of Xaircraft, said China's agricultural drone market will grow rapidly within two to three years, with the number of such drones reaching 500,000 to 1 million units.

Data from Qianzhan also showed the whole domestic civilian drone market will reach more than 96.8 billion yuan by 2023, at compound annual growth rate surpassing 60 percent.

A series of incidents involving low-flying drones in restricted areas around major Chinese airports in 2017 had led to tighter usage regulations, which had an adverse impact on product sales.

The Civil Aviation Administration of China said commercial UAVs weighing more than 250 grams had to be registered under the owner's real name from June 1, 2017.

Other domestic drone manufacturers are investing heavily in industry drones. EHang impressed the world with its concept of a passenger drone already at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in 2016. The 184, which is the world's first autonomous aerial vehicle, can fly for up to 30 minutes at a maximum cruising speed of 160 km/h, and has an average cruise speed of 100 km/h.

In 2017, the company announced a partnership with Dubai's government to use its Ehang 184 passenger-carrying drone in the city's smart transportation system.

Derrick Xiong, co-founder of EHang, said with the rise in labor costs and rapid growth of smart delivery systems, EHang is poised to empower companies across industrial segments like courier services, logistics, retail and e-commerce, with its smart drones that offer safe and efficient functionality.

In 2018, it teamed up with supermarket chain Yonghui Superstores Co in smart retail and aerial drone food delivery. With the help of drones, the delivery time was reduced from at least 30 minutes to about 15 minutes, which ensures freshness of food and efficiency in delivery.

EHang said its automatic, intelligent and networked drone technology provides an integrated drone delivery solution for Super Species, Yonghui's fresh food store.

EHang has also partnered with the government of Shaoguan city in Guangdong province, to build a smart city with a UAV command center and systems.

Hu Huazhi, Ehang's founder and CEO, said: "In the future, the real value of UAVs will lie in intelligence, integration, digitalization and networking, which are exactly the core technical advantages of Ehang."

Based in Guangzhou, EHang announced last year it would establish its first European research center in Lyon, France. In November, the company inked a strategic partnership with Austrian aerospace group FACC to jointly develop new solutions for autonomous flying.

Pan from IDC said the exploration of application scenarios for drone products has encountered a bottleneck, and at present, the application of industrial drones is still at an initial stage and "we still need time to see large-scale application of drones in various sectors".

Jason Low, an analyst from market intelligence firm Canalys, said large drone companies are focusing on professional and industry-level drones, spending a large part of their investment on developing their software and hardware platforms, and in attracting developers to create apps and new use cases for their drones.

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