Ying, the live streaming brainchild of Tencent and ZeroTech. Photo credit: Tencent.
Tencent’s hardware partner for Ying, the Chinese tech giant’s first live streaming drone, could be in trouble. Last Friday, Beijing-based ZeroTech let go 134 employees or a quarter of its staff, stating high operation costs, over-hiring, and a shortage of core members and mid-level managers as main reasons.
“People I’ve brought shame on in 2016: my colleagues, suppliers, partners, investors, family, and myself,” wrote Yang Jianjun, founder and CEO of ZeroTech, on Zhihu, China’s answer to Quora. “Today, failure. Someday, fulfillment.”
There will be no layoffs in 2017, Jianjun promised.
ZeroTech’s slimming down of personnel could be the result of China’s increasingly competitive consumer drone industry. Last year saw the rise of small, foldable drones centered around photography and video, such as the Hover Camera and DJI’s Mavic Pro.
Apart from Ying, ZeroTech has its own pocket drone in the race: Dobby, a foldable drone about the weight of an iPhone 7 Plus. According to analysts cited by South China Morning Post, DJI owns 70 percent of the consumer drone market.
Dobby on a test flight. Photo credit: Tech in Asia.
The layoffs at ZeroTech could mean a tighter focus on Dobby, as the startup continues to shift its business towards consumer drones and quadcopters, having begun as a fixed-wing drone company in 2007. In September, ZeroTech raised a US$21.6 million series B round of funding from Qualcomm Ventures, among other investors.
The future of Tencent’s Ying, unveiled at last year’s CES, looks less certain, as shipments of the live streaming drone have been postponed. The Ying launched its pre-order sales at the end of last October, and has an accompanying smartphone app that lets users upload live streams directly to WeChat and QQ. However, with the latest news of ZeroTech’s staff cuts, further development of Ying drones could be delayed.
According to Shi Shengqing, co-founder and CFO of ZeroTech, the drone startup and Tencent began developing Ying in 2015. Tencent is responsible for the software part of Ying – the app – and ZeroTech takes care of the hardware.
“A lot of big companies are interested in [drones] but have no way of entering this market,”
Shengqing told Tech in Asia in October last year.
For instance, Tencent’s whole team comes from a software background. “Their understanding of hardware is a little too idealistic,” he explained. “When internet companies partner with hardware companies, there will be this kind of problem.”
We’ve reached out to both ZeroTech and Tencent and will update this story once we hear back.
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