The Taiwanese company Ubiqconn Technology also recently teamed up with the US drone company AeroVironment—best known for making Switchblade loitering munition drones—to embed AeroVironment’s software into a drone controller platform that would allow the Taiwanese military to operate multiple types of drone systems, Nikkei Asia reported.

Rough air ahead

However, Taiwan’s homegrown drone ambitions face plenty of challenges, including political disagreement. The special budget proposal for Taiwan’s military to purchase Taiwanese drones represents an attempt to break a political deadlock in Taiwan’s Legislature, where the majority consists of the opposition parties Kuomintang and the Taiwan People’s Party. That majority coalition vetoed funding for domestically produced drones before passing a reduced defense budget bill in May.

Despite having a drone supply chain bolstered by chipmaking and electronics expertise, Taiwan faces an uphill battle in matching the manufacturing output and market dominance of China’s drone industry. The Shenzhen-based drone company DJI alone has between 70 and 80 percent global market share for commercial drones and is known for producing high-quality drones at extremely competitive prices.

“For the international market, how do you persuade other foreign governments to use Taiwanese-made drones two or three times more expensive than DJI’s?” said Ting-Wei Lin, a non-resident fellow at DSET, in a Resilience Media interview.

Taiwanese drone manufacturers are still establishing supply chains completely free of Chinese-made components. Tiger Thunder recently defended its actions in supplying Taiwan’s military with drones that included chips manufactured by the French company STMicroelectronics but packaged in China.

Taiwan is also looking to increase its monthly drone production capacity that currently stands at 15,000 drones per month, according to the Ministry of Economic Affairs. The ministry projects that the Taiwanese drone industry could exceed 100,000 drones per month by 2030.

Some inspiration may come from Ukraine’s example. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Ukraine could only produce several thousand FPV drones per year, according to Just Security. By 2025, Ukrainian government and industry efforts had boosted domestic FPV drone production to about 3 million drones—and Ukraine’s defense industry could produce more than 8 million such drones in 2026.

Meanwhile, Taiwanese civil defense groups are also taking a cue from Ukraine’s example and offering more lessons in flying drones, The Guardian reported. Because, despite the recent wartime demonstrations of AI-powered battlefield drones, most drones still rely heavily on human operators one way or another.