Seems weird. China is definitely falling behind. India is not.
On the topic of manufacturing outside China, the YouTuber "Smarter Every day" (Destin Sandlin) has a series on manufacturing and feels strongly about manufacturing having moved out of the country. As an experiment he tried to manufacture something without China, but was unable to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY
I just ordered a bunch of drone parts. The majority of those part were only available from China.
As near as I can tell, the vast majority of the parts are made in China. When I look at the few alternatives, they're full of Chinese circuitry. If I look at circuit components, they're all made of Chinese raw materials.
Both Ukraine and Russia are planning to deploy (and use up) several million drones over the next year. Iran just joined them as a major procurer.
Where are all the US and EU component factories?
While they satisfy the technical requirement of, "there exists an alternative" neither of them is generally available as a viable alternative to China.
If "for me" is limited to some rich guy in the Netherlands, that doesn't solve the problem "for anyone else."
And 'some rich guy in the Netherlands' is a nice target for you but I know plenty of people that are in other parts of Europe that seem to have no problem ordering from both of these. You asked for alternatives, you got them. You could have just left it at that but you feel the need to explain why those alternatives are not the alternatives you wanted. What did you expect? A 1-900 number and someone taking your credit card?
"Some rich guy in the Netherlands" isn't about being a nice target. You keep saying it works for you but you can't demonstrate any way that works for others.
I can point you to a number of places that sell any number of Chinese drone parts that don't involve a "1-900 number". You can find them on Amazon. Any number of drone vendors sell them through normal sales portals. The manufacturers will ship them directly.
A handful of companies that require a bespoke procurement process and are operating at a tiny fraction of the scale do not have any appreciable impact on the market for drone parts today.
How much of these products are sourced from EU materials? Like is the copper in the wires from the EU? Is the wire made in the EU and coated with insulator there too? Are the motors wound in Europe?
Mostly Latin America afaik but copper re-use is so high that it is hard to tell what the original source is.
> Is the wire made in the EU and coated with insulator there too?
Not in the EU but close by.
> Are the motors wound in Europe?
Yes, there are multiple drone motor manufacturers in Europe now. Annual production is in the millions.
The magnets are almost certainly from China.
The top copper producer in the EU is Poland so that's a possible source of copper. They're pretty far down the list though so it's likely that a large part of the copper is coming from places like Chile (top producer in the world).
On those specific parts:
Motors: T-Motor F90 1300KV - $119.60(incl shipping) + Tariff
ESC: Holybro Tekko32 F4 50A - $88.97(incl shipping) + Tariff
FC: Matek H743-SLIM V4 - £88.12(incl shipping + VAT) + Tariff
Radio: Radiomaster M2 $95.99(incl shipping + sales tax)
The FC was from a UK store but it originated in China. I already had the radio so I don't have current prices on it.
I'd love to find a list of vendors that have comparable parts, in stock, and without being insane multiples of those prices.
edit: formatting
Arctus asks you to contact them just for product info. It seems they just raised 2.6M in seed funding 3 months ago. It's great that there are startups in NL but that's not even close to a replacement for China's scale yet.
Both of these may change the landscape in the future. For now, neither of them is a practical way to get drone parts without China.
They absolutely do.
> Arctus asks you to contact them just for product info.
You can order as much as you want from them, the price is right and the quality is extremely high.
Indeed, they're not on AliExpress, but that's roughly the difference between being a producer in Europe and in China, and that is precisely the difference that you should be happy with.
Its easy to verify that Motor-g does not ship outside of Ukraine. I just put 4 of their motors in a shopping cart and tried to check out. The drop down menu for destination country has a single option, Ukraine.
Arctus does not list a single price on their website. That's also easy to verify. Every single product on their website only says, "request product data", or "coming soon".
All I did was mail the manufacturer, asked for a quote, got a mail in return, they sent an invoice, I paid the invoice and they sent me the goods. Just like I would expect.
Can you demonstrate a process that others can follow?