Draganfly ($DPRO) CEO on Military Drone Demand, Defense Contracts, and Scaling for Growth

Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

Yeah, so for sure the largest market that's on fire right now is military. So obviously, propagated by the conflict in Ukraine, the demonstration of the use cases, the success of drones, and now the necessity of drones, you basically see every military in the world, not just because of geopolitics but because of the effectiveness of drones, now really designing all their concepts of operations frankly around drones. So the military market is the most dominant market available in the globe today. We're very fortunate as a company. We've been around for 27 years. To my knowledge, we're the oldest drone company in the world, certainly in the small Category 1, Category 2 drones. And so we've got a full product lineup of drones. To my knowledge, again, there's only one other company that has a fully integrated line of drones like we do, and that would be DJI. A lot of the other North American startups, and when I say startups, these are five to seven year old companies as compared to say the 27 years that we've been around, they've got one drone or they might have two drones or a one drone variant type of scenario. But for us to have a full product lineup that's built into concepts of operations that can meet military demands, we're fairly uniquely positioned.

Well, I would say other than a couple of the obvious table stake things that you have to have, which is an incredibly well-performing drone and an incredibly well-performing organization to meet military standard, above that, the capacity, security concern, supply chain management, strong balance sheet are paramount. You can come out with the greatest whiz-bang new technology, but if you can't produce 300,000 of them on a 30 or 90-day notice, at quality, with scale, with clearances, etc., etc., you can't compete because that's just what those types of organizations need. And when you opened, you'd mentioned it was fairly concentrated, and I think that's a very fair comment, because the drone market is hot. There are a lot of companies in the space right now, but there are very few companies, very very few companies that can actually deliver at this level. And so I think that's an important distinction.