Dhe growth plans of the South Hesse drone manufacturer Wingcopter have suffered a severe setback: nothing will come of the delivery of 12,000 cargo drones to Africa agreed in spring 2022. Wingcopter had already terminated the contract at the end of last year, a company spokesman said when asked on Tuesday. “Welt am Sonntag” first reported on it.
In May 2022, Wingcopter signed an agreement with the investment holding Atlantic Trust that stipulated that it would deliver 12,000 drones to the Atlantic Trust subsidiary Continental Drones within five years. The unmanned small aircraft would be used to deliver medicine and food throughout Africa. This is planned to be the largest commercial deployment to date in the global delivery drone industry, according to a joint press release that can still be found on the Atlantic Trust website today. The holding company is headquartered in Ghana and, according to its own statement, invests in various industries in Africa and Asia. Mentioned on the website include real estate, a television station, online gambling, oil and gas exploration, palm oil plantations and rice cultivation. The link to the subsidiary Continental Drones currently leads nowhere.
Drones should be used to deliver medicines
The Wingcopter spokesman justified the cancellation of the contract by saying that the business partner had “not fulfilled its contractual obligations”. The construction of the desired drones had not yet begun at the time the contract was terminated. This suggests that Continental Drones failed to make the expected down payments.
The spokesman said the termination of the contract would not have any impact on other Wingcopter projects in Africa. In Malawi, East Africa, Wingcopter drones are used to deliver medicines to health centers in rural areas. The project is financed by the children’s aid organization UNICEF. A cooperation between Wingcopter and the medical technology group Siemens Healthineers is also intended to improve medical care in Africa. In Kenya, the two companies have already tested the transport of blood samples and laboratory material by drone. According to the Wingcopter spokesman, it is still unclear when regular operations will begin.
Production of up to 1000 drones annually
Another pilot project has been running for a few weeks in the Odenwald, where Wingcopter is delivering groceries for a Rewe market. However, the drones are not allowed to land directly at the customer’s location, but only on the outskirts of town; the deliveries are then transported on by cargo bike. The experiment is being funded by the Federal Ministry of Transport until the end of the year.
(The company does not reveal how many drones Wingcopter has built and sold since it was founded in 2017. It has a production facility in Weiterstadt that is designed to produce up to 1,000 drones per year. Depreciation is the end of the large drone order not connected, said the Wingcopter spokesman. “We are financially well positioned anyway after the 40 million euro financing from the European Investment Bank.”
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