DJI emerged from Shenzhen with deep engineering culture, not cheap manufacturing. The drone maker launches expensive models first, then rapidly iterates while prices drop, dominating both premium and budget segments. This challenges Silicon Valley's belief that Chinese firms can't innovate.
So DJI is a company that grew up in the Pearl River Delta in Shenzhen. I described the companies of that era as the ones that were making iPhones for 10 years and taking notes, the iPhone processes and everything about Apple and the iPhone was something they were really well schooled on ggi. So I lived in China for four years. My children were born there and I knew that they, that they were not just copying, they weren't just low cost manufacturing. I knew that there was a really strong engineering culture there. And so we were prepared for this. We were prepared for tough competition from China and we had the theory, which I'll get to in a second. But everyone said, and you still hear this. I can't believe you still hear this in Silicon Valley. Everyone said, oh, don't worry about China, they can't do X. And sometimes X was innovate or sometimes X was like global distribution, or sometimes X was marketing, or sometimes X was software or design or something. As far as I can tell, there's no X. We haven't found an X. DJI does all that stuff. They started global. Fantastic software, fantastic marketing, fantastic design. They innovate. Everyone said, oh, don't worry, China just copies. I don't know when that was true, but that has not been true in my life since I've been paying attention there. DJI is innovating faster than everybody else. I talked to the US trade reps and they're like, so did DJI dump products under cost? Do you want to file? I was like, no, they kicked our ass, just fair and square. And it's like, by the way. And they kept their prices higher than ours. What they did is they just innovated faster. So what they would do is they would release a product at 1500 bucks, which is higher than our price. And we're like, ah, our product's cheaper. Then like six months later they'd release another product at 1600, 1500 bucks, whatever. And then that product they'd released six months earlier goes down to 500 bucks. And so they managed to get the high end of the market and the low end of the market by simply iterating so fast. And I'm like, this is not dumping, right? This is just innovation. This is a country doing to Silicon Valley what Silicon Valley did to everybody else.
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