Drone manufacturer DJI has closed US R&D department
Drone manufacturer DJI has closed its US R&D department and laid off employees. The company confirms that. According to Reuters news agency, the company is facing idleness, now that American companies are no longer allowed to trade with the drone maker.
DJI tells Reuters that the company no longer needed the R&D department due to “changing needs.” After the head of the R&D department left, the manufacturer decided that the other ten employees in the department in Palo Alto were no longer needed either. DJI emphasizes that sales of its drones in the United States are still growing.
Reuters claims based on conversations with four employees that many more people have left the American branch of the company. This would be about a third of the group of two hundred people who worked for DJI in the United States last year. The company is not responding to claims that a third of its American employees are gone.
US companies have been banned from trading with DJI since December due to the listing on the US government’s Entity List. The drone manufacturer has been blacklisted for allegedly facilitating large-scale human rights violations in China, a U.S. Department of Commerce committee said. According to the committee, this concerns high-tech surveillance. The ministry does not go into detail about how that would have happened.
Due to the ban, DJI can no longer purchase components from American suppliers. DJI has updated its iOS apps since the trade ban, but the most recent Android app update predates the trade ban. It is unknown whether updating an app counts as ‘trading’ under the ban.
Update, 11:17: As tweaker Helium-3 points out, DJI is now distributing updates to its Fly app for Android through its own site rather than through the Play Store.
DJI Mavic Air 2