After 300,000 flights in Shenzhen, the US e-commerce giant announced its drone delivery plan

Amazon recently announced plans to use drones to deliver packages in the UK by the end of 2024. The plan dates back to a decade ago when company founder Jeff Bezos first announced that he would deliver personal packages in the air, but various reasons led to the plan being shelved. Far across the ocean, China is already "far ahead" in the drone delivery business.

Three years after Bezos announced Amazon's aerial plan, the project was officially launched in Cambridge, England, accompanied by a wonderful promotional video. The project has been running lukewarmly since its launch, but in 2021, the project was suddenly stopped.

In 2023, Amazon's dream of "drone delivery in half an hour" was revived, and this time the pilot was chosen in Texas, USA. In May, Amazon completed only 100 deliveries in total. An important reason for this was that at one of the locations in Texas, when the temperature was too high, operations had to be suspended.

But this does not seem to have stopped Amazon from restarting drone delivery this time. The company plans to continue to launch delivery robot projects in the UK and Italy. In order to ensure the smooth operation of the project, Amazon has prepared new drones and built a huge logistics network. The first thing to promote this "half-hour delivery" is medicine delivery.

Amazon customers can choose "free drone delivery within 60 minutes" when checking out, after which the pharmacist will pack the medicine and deliver it to the customer's home by drone. Medicines delivered by drones usually include medicines for common diseases such as influenza, asthma and pneumonia. Customers who need emergency medical services can visit Amazon's 24-hour virtual medical online service "Amazon Clinic" to quickly complete medication prescriptions and drug delivery.

Amazon's persistence may be due to the success of its peers. A company called Zipline initially used drones to deliver blood and medicines to remote areas of Rwanda. It has now expanded to Ghana and North Carolina, USA. Other companies such as logistics giant UPS and Google's Wing have also begun to provide similar services. Amazon does not want to be far ahead in this technological distribution.

But if they look further ahead, China's drone delivery business has already formed a certain scale. CCTV's "Noon Finance" has published three consecutive articles reporting on Shenzhen's drone food delivery, urban low-altitude logistics network, and helicopter sightseeing and other low-altitude economies.

As of the end of 2022, Meituan's drone trial routes in Shenzhen have been implemented in 5 business districts, covering 18 communities and office buildings, with a cumulative delivery order volume of more than 120,000 orders; logistics leader SF Express has also relied on drones to form a low-altitude drone logistics network covering the entire city of Shenzhen. In the first quarter of 2023, the industrial operation of drones in Shenzhen has accumulated more than 1,800 sorties, transported more than 130,000 pieces of cargo, and opened 83 drone routes, achieving about 300,000 drone cargo and comprehensive application flights.

There are some important commonalities in successful drone delivery cases - the delivery needs are urgent, the delivery manpower is insufficient, and the items are light. The use of drones can reduce the delivery pressure of urgent items, but the disadvantage is that when the volume has not reached a certain scale, the delivery cost is greatly increased.

According to Amazon's estimates, if the drone business goes smoothly, it is expected to drop to $63 by 2025, while the current cost of delivering a single package is $484.