The Low-Altitude Economy

Most countries treat the airspace just above the rooftops as empty. China has decided to industrialise it. In 2024, the “low-altitude economy”, broadly, everything flying below about 1,000 metres, was written into the national Government Work Report as a new growth engine.^[1]

The targets are characteristically large. China’s aviation regulator projects the sector at 1.5 trillion yuan (~$210 billion) by 2025 and 3.5 trillion by 2035, and roughly 89,000 firms already operate in it, with new registrations up more than 200% year on year.^[1]

China is legislating the sky into an industry, and already holds the world’s first type certificate for a pilotless passenger air taxi.

Certificates and deliveries

Two milestones show it is more than a plan. In October 2023, EHang’s EH216-S became the world’s first passenger-carrying eVTOL to receive a type certificate from a civil-aviation regulator, the airworthiness approval that separates a concept from a certifiable aircraft.^[2] And in April 2025, Meituan received China’s first nationwide low-altitude logistics licence; by then it had already flown more than 450,000 drone-delivery orders across 53 routes, a figure that passed 900,000 by mid-2026.^[3][4]

A policy-created market has a distinctive risk profile. Demand is organised from the top; airspace rules, infrastructure and procurement arrive on a plan rather than in response to proven willingness to pay — which front-loads activity and can outrun real economics. That is precisely why the certified and the licensed matter so much more than the conceptual here: a type certificate or an operating licence is the evidence that a company has cleared the gate the plan actually gates on. The ~900,000 drone deliveries already flown are a better signal than any headline market-size projection, because they are demand that showed up.

Reading it as an investor

The low-altitude economy is a policy-created market, which is both its strength and its risk: demand is being organised top-down, with airspace rules, infrastructure and procurement following. That favours companies aligned with the certification and infrastructure build-out, eVTOL makers with real type certificates, drone-logistics operators with licences, and the air-traffic, charging and vertiport layers beneath them. We separate the certified from the conceptual, and read order and flight data over press releases.