• Google’s drone delivery arm, Wing, has partnered with Vicinity Centre, a retail property group, for a commercial drone-based package delivery service from the Vicinity Centre’s Grand Plaza shopping mall in Logan, Queensland to customer residences and offices.

• The company started conducting deliveries in late August, teaming up with several shops. It has plans to expand the service area and to include other businesses located at the shopping center. Thus far, the company has made more than 2,500 deliveries to residents in parts of the Logan suburbs.

• With this, Wing introduced a new business model of co-locating at retailers’ premises, moving away from its previous business center model, which required individual retailers to co-locate at Wing’s distribution centers, where the drones are loaded. The entire delivery process will reportedly take roughly 10–15 minutes with flight time taking up about 2–3 minutes. The company also claims the service is about 50x more efficient compared to using a gas-powered vehicle and 10x more efficient than an electric car.

<ul><li> Analyst QuickTake: Google Wing, established as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. conducts drone-based deliveries through three test sites across the globe (Virginia, US and Helsinki, Finland in addition to Queensland). It reported completing 100,000 drone-based deliveries in August this year, and the majority of the deliveries were in Queensland. Although Wing is not the first drone company to offer deliveries from a shopping mall to customer residences, it is the first to have launched the service commercially. In fact, Virginia-based drone solutions provider DroneUp also announced a similar trial in Ontario, California in July. </ul>