The Hessian start-up Wingcopter is on the way to becoming the largest cargo drone manufacturer in the world.
The conglomerate Atlantic Trust Holding has agreed with the company to purchase 12,000 drones and sell them in Africa.
Delivery is to take place over five years.
According to the start-up from Weiterstadt near Darmstadt, this represents the largest commercial deployment in the global delivery drone industry to date.
With this order, Wingcopter will be “lifted to the global top” in the industry, said founder Tom Plümmer.
Falk Heunemann
Business editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.
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The cargo drones are primarily intended to bring medicines, vaccines or, in an emergency, food to regions that are difficult to access.
Wingcopter's aircraft, which has a wingspan of almost two meters, can transport packages weighing up to six kilograms over a distance of up to 75 kilometers.
The electrically powered aircraft are controlled from the ground.
For distribution in Africa, Wingcopter has signed a partnership agreement with Continental Drones, a subsidiary of Ghana and Dubai based Atlantic Trust Holding.
The investment company also owns a television station, a lottery and several resource companies.
Continental Drones is to sell the Weiterstadt aircraft in 49 sub-Saharan African countries and set up delivery networks there.
However, it was not known whether the African sales partner had given a purchase guarantee for all 12,000 drones.
That would result in an investment in the hundreds of millions.
According to its own account, the holding company was founded in 2001 by a former investment banker to invest in real estate in the Ghanaian capital.
partnership with Americans
In turn, three Darmstadt students founded Wingcopter in 2017.
The company currently has 120 employees. A year ago it moved into a former factory for e-bikes in Weiterstadt in order to be able to produce drones on the assembly line there.
The production capacity of around 3000 aircraft per year is unlikely to be sufficient in the long term to process all orders.
The order from Africa is not the only large order.
At the beginning of the year, the company entered into a partnership with the American flight service provider Air Methods and its drone subsidiary Spright to set up a drone delivery network between hundreds of American hospitals.
The cargo planes are supposed to transport laboratory samples, medicines or donor organs there, for example.
Initial pilot projects are currently underway in the sparsely populated US states of Kansas and Oregon.
To finance global growth, Wingcopter relies on several investors, including investors from the American Silicon Valley and the Hessian growth fund Futury.
A few weeks ago, the Japanese Fortune 500 group Itochu invested 22 million dollars in the still young company.
Several manufacturers around the world are working on cargo drones, and Zipline from California is one of Wingcopter's biggest competitors.
The corona pandemic had brought strong demand to the industry.
Wingcopter mainly relies on drones for medical transports in hard-to-reach areas, since fast delivery is particularly important to them and high transport costs are less of a problem for them than for normal packages.