The explosion in popularity of e-commerce and online shopping made millionaires out of many investors. To date, there have been a number of different business that have been positively impacted and have rapidly grown their operations as a result of consumers switching to online shopping.
Shopify is one of those companies. Since it launched in 2015, its stock is up nearly 1,200%. It’s an essential company for the e-commerce business, and therefore its investors, especially the ones who got in early, have been rewarded handsomely.
Another company that’s been largely impacted by the increase in online shopping is Cargojet. Due to the massive increase in demand for shipping, and especially overnight shipping, as most consumers want their purchases as soon as possible, Cargojet has seen its business increase rapidly.
It has more than 90% of the market share for overnight deliveries in Canada and has partnerships with Canada Post as well as Amazon.
It’s clear that as the demand for online goods rises, so does demand for shipping. A lot has been made of the future of shipping, whether it be through driverless cars and trucks or even drones.
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has been completing a number of test flights recently through its subsidiary company, Wing.
These tests are already showing how fast the deliveries can be made and are demonstrating the endless possibilities of this new technology. Drone delivery is also being looked at to ease congestion, getting more trucks off the road.
One Canadian company for investors to consider that will give you direct exposure to this future industry is Drone Delivery Canada (TSXV:FLT).
FLT is still in the test stages, allowing investors to get in on the ground floor at an extremely generous market cap of less than $120 million.
The testing it’s doing is with a number of pilot-project customers such as Vision Profile, a manufacturing company that will test a drone delivery platform between its facilities in Vaughn, Ontario.
It’s also been testing with Moose Cree Fist Nation to try and help scale the costs of delivering food, medicine, and other necessities to the remote location in northern Ontario.
So far, FLT has been developing its technology since 2014 and has two main services it plans to offer once its operations are up and running.
The first service is depot-to-depot drone delivery service. This will be similar to the pilot project it’s doing with the Moose Cree First Nation in that it’s ideally a logistics solution for rural communities in Canada in need of a reliable delivery service, especially for necessities.
It can also be used in emergency situations to dispatch important medical equipment or even to help with bulk mail shipments from one facility to another.
The second type of service it will offer is depot-to-consumer drone delivery. This is the main service people think about when they hear drone delivery, and the applications for this type of delivery are limitless. Depot to consumer would consist of delivery services directly to a residence or business.
At the moment, FLT thinks its main services will be in food delivery, retail goods, service parts, and emergency road-side assistance.
Currently, it continues to work on its technology to build on the logistics while also tweaking important flight variables such as route planning, telemetry settings for its mission control centre, and planning scheduled maintenance of the drones.
With the pace of technology these days, and the impressive development that’s already been accomplished, drone delivery is closer than we think, so an investment in FLT today could prove to be a millionaire-making decision.
