By Dan Steiner,
Senior Writer
While most brands are looking to make an impact on the ground, others have their heads in the clouds.
Two such businesses are Auckland’s Rocket Lab and Sydney’s Droneshield, which have innovated and partnered their way to admittedly modest success so far, but both operate in aerial areas with major potential, so the sky’s the limit (sorry, couldn’t resist).
Let’s take a closer look at the respective categories they play in.
In defence of drones
According to a Business Insider forecast from earlier this year, the drone services market is due to be worth over $88b by 2025, with growth “to occur across the four main segments of the enterprise industry: Agriculture, construction and mining, insurance, and media and telecommunications”. The industry benefitted from Covid, too, with a marked increase in their use for tasks like mapping and site inspections, in lieu of teams being able to physically do so.
But the real opportunity exists in the military sector.
Locally, defence spending currently sits at 2 per cent of GDP; it’s predicted to almost double by decade’s end.
Worldwide, spending has accelerated in recent years, driven by both escalating tensions and changes in the way those tensions are being addressed. For instance, investment in solutions like robotics, flame-retardant fabrics, and advanced optics are on the up.
UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), the military’s more specific name for drones, vary greatly in size and purpose. The one thing they have in common across the world is their popularity on the modern battlefield.
Philippe Odouard, Managing Director of Canberra-based defence products manufacturer Xtek, spoke of drone tech’s breadth in Stockhead earlier this year, saying, “There’s real tenders going out covering all sizes you can dream of — from an 18-gram device you can carry to what they call the Triton, which has a wingspan of a 757.”
Droneshield, which builds and sells patented counterdrone systems, anticipates its worth to be $6.2bn by 2026. At present, this One to Watch has local partnerships, plus contracts with the US Airforce and the EU. But as UAV adoption increases globally, that valuation could even be an understatement.
A surging space sector
The OECD defines The Space Economy as: “The full range of activities and the use of resources that create value and benefits to human beings in the course of exploring, researching, understanding, managing, and utilising space.”
Bank of America has forecast that, in the next decade, the value of the space economy will treble to almost $2 trillion.
Rocket Lab, which in 2009 became the first company to launch a rocket in the southern hemisphere, has now launched 65 satellites. The NZ brand’s recent acquisition of a nano-satellite company and partnership with a communications services business has made them an attractive — and somewhat affordable, with “rideshare” missions that allow them to launch multiple payloads at once — option for business and government space activity. So much so, this One to Watch is supporting NASA’s next moon mission.
In the next decade, the value of the space economy will treble to almost $2 trillion.
The big space dollars lie in the B2B and government sectors. As of 2019, almost 50 nations had government space budgets, one of which was Australia. In fact, we’re an overachiever, with our own space agency, a spaceport due early next year (only 13 countries worldwide have such launch capacity), and an estimated 14,000 employees working across 770 space-related businesses in FY18–19. That same FY, the local space economy reported revenue of $5b.
Currently, much of the focus lies in satellites for communications and observation, but the industry is continuing to open up, with the Australian Government committing around $7b to space capabilities over the next decade, from sensors and tracking systems to independent satellite networks.
Earlier this year, Space X became the first commercial company to launch astronauts — in a reusable rocket, no less. Meanwhile, Blue Origin, owned by Jeff Bezos, continues working on “opening the promise of space to all”.
For humans, space remains our loftiest ambition, but each day we take one small step closer to realising our various space goals (recent Starship prototype test flight explosion notwithstanding).
For humans, space remains our loftiest ambition.
On the other hand, each day also seemingly brings new threats to our safety — and, subsequently, new tech to counter them.
Up in the Air isn’t a category, but it is an aptly named territory, in that it’s one filled with complexities. While the skies above are the site of bold visions and colossal achievements, they’re also our newest arena for war. Over the next decade, how brands negotiate them will be fascinating, especially when you consider KPMG’s May prediction that, by 2030, every business will be a “space business”.
