Blue Dart buoyant on successful drone delivery trial of vaccines; bets on express logistics, e-commerce

The Blue Dart stock has been surging in trade, up 17 percent in the last month and 56 percent this year. The company also recently commenced drone trials to support the delivery of medical supplies. To discuss the demand and the outlook, CNBC-TV18 spoke to Balfour Manuel, MD of Blue Dart.

On drone trials, Manuel said, “It has been a breakthrough. It is the first BVLOS (beyond visual line of sight) flight, it was a super successful flight. Blue Dart always wanted to provide value to our customers, so it really fits into that dynamic. We also have here an example of public-private partnerships. So I give credit to our partners, the Government of Telangana and Skye Air, our tech partners, who made this possible. It is their proactive work that made it possible in such a short time. The mission was to carry vaccines in this time of the pandemic, it very much connects to the need of the hour and Blue Dart has always been in the express space, and we wanted to be the first ones to venture into it.”

He added, “The proof of the concept is there and very clearly, we have established that it can serve as a very high-tech service provider to the remotest parts of the country. If you asked me about logistics -higher weight categories are still in experimental mode.”