Walmart Inc. and DroneUp LLC, the retail firm's drone delivery partner, will be discontinuing drone deliveries in Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Tampa to concentrate on the Dallas-Fort Worth area in Texas, the latter told Axios on Friday.
"We're really focusing on automation, and a drone with higher payload capacity and longer range. Now it's time to focus on that scalable model," DroneUp CEO Tom Walker said. He explained that while the drone hubs in Arizona, Florida, and Utah were valuable for learning about consumer demand they weren't sustainable.
Walker detailed that these types of deliveries are still expensive for companies, as it costs around $30 to deliver a package. He went on to say that the aim is to get these costs down to $7. The closure of 18 hubs across the three mentioned states will affect 17% of the total DroneUp headcount.
