Reimagining Growth: Low-altitude economy takes off

The 2025 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum will take place from January 20 to 24 in Davos, Switzerland, with one of the focuses being reimagining growth. Low-altitude economy is one of the new sources of growth for the global economy.

The low-altitude economy generally covers crewed and uncrewed aerial activities below 1,000 meters, extendable to 3,000 meters per regional and practical needs. Applications include consumer, public sector, transportation and logistics, as well as long-range applications.

Between 2021 and 2023, countries such as the U.S. and the UK started piloting flying taxis. Amazon started Prime Air drone delivery with real customers in some parts of the U.S. In 2024, China issued the world's first production license for electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft.

The global market size of low-altitude economy stood at 2.08 trillion yuan in 2023, and was expected to reach 2.32 trillion yuan in 2024. The Chinese market size was 505.95 billion yuan in 2023 with a year-on-year growth rate of 33.8 percent, and was projected to be 3.5 trillion yuan in 2035.

China leads globally in fields such as the research and development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), equipment manufacturing, new-generation communication technologies. The number of patent applications related to the low-altitude economy in China increased from 852 in 2014 to 14,134 in 2023.

As of the end of November 2024, China has 744 general aviation enterprises, 3,226 registered general aviation aircraft, 470 general airports. The country has 19,000 enterprises engaged in UAV operations, and 2.158 million registered UAVs. In 2023, industrial scale of eVTOL aircraft in China reached 980 million yuan, increasing 77.3 percent compared to a year before, and that number is expected to be 9.5 billion yuan in 2026.