The pioneering action camera company GoPro recently announced its board has authorized a "strategic review process," exploring options including a potential sale or merger, alongside plans to cut 145 jobs, marking its third round of layoffs in nearly two years. This move towards a potential sale is driven by deteriorating financials. In 2025, its revenue was $652 million (approximately RMB 4.046 billion), a decline of nearly 20% year-over-year. Net profit attributable to shareholders was a loss of $80.82 million (-RMB 549 million), with the loss widening by 73.03% year-over-year. Cumulative losses from 2023 to 2025 totaled about $580 million (RMB 3.94 billion).
While GoPro struggles, another star in the sports imaging sector, Insta360, also reported challenging results. In 2025, Insta360 achieved revenue of RMB 9.741 billion, a year-over-year increase of 74.76%, reaching a record high. However, net profit attributable to shareholders was only RMB 929 million, down 6.62% year-over-year, ending its previous trend of sustained profit growth. This trend intensified in Q1 2026, with revenue growing 83.11% year-over-year to RMB 2.481 billion, but net profit attributable to shareholders plummeted 52.02% to RMB 85 million.
Financially, Insta360 has already left GoPro behind. But the real battle is just beginning because its opponent is DJI. Insta360, leveraging internet marketing strategies and differentiated products, has emerged as a new challenger in the field. DJI, relying on its technological barriers and control over the entire industry chain, has fortified its moat, solidifying its position as the industry leader. The impact of this conflict extends far beyond these two companies.
**The Cost of Challenging DJI**
Facing the sharp decline in profitability, Liu Jingkang explained it was a proactive strategic choice to "trade short-term profits for long-term barriers." The root cause lies in Insta360's active initiation of a full-scale confrontation with DJI last year, which involved heavy investments to gain market share, putting pressure on current profits.
On July 28, 2025, Insta360 announced its entry into the consumer drone market, launching the brand "Yingling Antigravity" through third-party incubation. Merely three days later, DJI officially launched its first panoramic camera, the Osmo 360, with a standard kit priced at RMB 2,999, nearly RMB 800 cheaper than Insta360's flagship X5 model priced at RMB 3,798. This retaliatory strategy of "you attack my backyard, I raid your home base" set the brutal tone for the showdown.
In the early hours after the Osmo 360 launch, Liu Jingkang posted on Weibo to "congratulate" DJI and announced a RMB 500 price cut for the X5 to RMB 3,298, escalating the battle. Subsequently, DJI pursued Insta360 with multiple rounds of price wars. In September last year, DJI launched the Osmo Nano, targeting Insta360's thumb-sized GO Ultra camera. With subsidies, its price was RMB 900 lower than the GO Ultra. In October of the same year, DJI initiated its most aggressive price cuts ever, reducing popular models like the handheld imaging device Pocket 3, the action camera Action 4, and the panoramic camera Osmo 360 by about 30%, achieving simultaneous suppression across multiple segments.
Under DJI's saturation attacks, Insta360's pricing power was continuously weakened. During last year's Double Twelve sales period, the Insta360 Ace Pro was directly discounted by RMB 1,400, and the Ace Pro 2 Play & Shoot Kit was reduced by RMB 500. On December 4, the Yingling A1 was officially launched at a price of RMB 6,799. In March of this year, the official price was directly reduced by RMB 1,300 to RMB 5,499, a drop of about 20%, coinciding with DJI's release of its first panoramic drone, the Avata 360. The Avata 360's starting price was RMB 2,788, only about 41% of the Yingling A1's launch price.
Beyond participating in regular e-commerce promotions, Insta360 also launched its own campaigns like the "88 Promotion" and "99 Promotion" in the second half of last year. Alongside direct price cuts, these included large coupons, trade-in subsidies, and other forms to stimulate end-user consumption. Price wars evolved from occasional responses into routine consumption, driving a sharp expansion in Insta360's sales expenses. In 2025, Insta360's sales expenses reached RMB 1.679 billion, a year-over-year increase of 103.31%, far exceeding revenue growth. Specifically, marketing expenses surged from RMB 336 million in the previous period to RMB 826 million, an increase of 145.4%. Sales platform fees increased from RMB 240 million to RMB 382 million, a 59.2% rise.
Although Insta360 exchanged price cuts for sales growth, the volume increase did not bring a corresponding profit boost. In 2025, Insta360's quarterly gross margins were 52.93%, 50.21%, 47.64%, and 37.53%, respectively. By Q4, its gross margin had fallen by over 15 percentage points compared to the beginning of the year. More critically, even with continuous concessions to consumers, Insta360 could not stop DJI's rapid breakthrough. According to a Jiuqian Consulting report, in Q3 2025, Insta360's market share in the global panoramic camera market plummeted from 85%-92% to 49%. This meant that DJI, with just one product, swallowed nearly half of Insta360's market share in a single quarter.
DJI's overwhelming pressure on Insta360 relies not only on price differences of hundreds or thousands of yuan but also on its systemic advantages accumulated over years: mature user perception, efficient supply chain systems, and stable channel control. These are far beyond what Insta360 can overcome with a few price cuts or promotions.
Offline stores, as core battlegrounds for consumer electronics brands to build user perception and broaden customer bases, naturally became a breakthrough point for Insta360. In some areas, Insta360 deliberately located its offline stores opposite DJI stores, engaging in close-quarters combat for customer traffic. However, this blind and aggressive channel expansion also directly drove up costs. According to public data, Insta360's offline flagship stores surged from 36 at the beginning of 2024 to nearly 300 by the end of 2025. Consequently, its operating costs in 2025 increased by 110.40% year-over-year, meaning that for every new store opened, the money Insta360 earned became more "expensive."
Despite heavy investment in offline expansion, Insta360's path to channel breakthrough remains difficult. It is reported that DJI strictly controls the product categories sold by distributors and authorized stores, with official stringent requirements against selling competing products. In some cases, Insta360 could not buy an "entry ticket" even with money. In November 2025, a distributor who had invested over RMB 1 million in renovating an Insta360 image store was required by the mall to remove its signage. The reason was that the mall's supplementary lease agreement with a DJI distributor promised "not to introduce or allow third-party brands with strong competitive relationships to DJI products to enter."
**From Jointly Besieging GoPro to Attacking Each Other's Core Territories**
Once upon a time, DJI and Insta360 were "good neighbors" in Nanshan District, Shenzhen. In 2015, 24-year-old Liu Jingkang led a small team of just over 10 people, renting an 80-square-meter duplex apartment in Shenzhen to found Insta360, focusing on the R&D, production, and sales of panoramic and action cameras. At that time, DJI already held over 70% of the global consumer drone market share, recognized as an industry giant.
Over the next decade, the two coexisted in a phase of competition and cooperation across different segments. DJI consolidated its leading position in the drone sector while horizontally expanding into handheld imaging to broaden its product boundaries. Insta360 deeply cultivated the niche panoramic camera segment, carving out a differentiated growth path, and went public on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's STAR Market in 2025, becoming the "first stock in smart imaging."
As DJI and Insta360 eroded the market share of the global imaging giant GoPro in drones and panoramic cameras, respectively, their boundaries gradually dissolved. In 2019, DJI launched its first action camera, the Osmo Action. In this sense, DJI was the first to cross the boundary. Currently, the Osmo Action series has become a leader in the global action camera market. IDC data shows that in 2025, in the broad action camera market, DJI's shipment market share approached 50%, comprehensively surpassing GoPro.
According to Liu Jingkang, Insta360 began preparing to enter the drone field as early as 2020, continuously registering multiple patents for "drones" and "panoramic drones." In January of the same year, Insta360 launched the modular action camera Insta360 ONER, whose feature was that the panoramic lens could be detached and replaced with a wide-angle lens similar to GoPro's. Rushed for release before CES 2020, the product faced quality control issues like connection instability and lens fogging upon launch.
Technical flaws could not conceal its strategic ambition. According to later interviews with Liu Jingkang, the modular camera launched by Insta360 in early 2020 aimed to enter the panoramic camera market while also wanting to "take a bite out of the traditional GoPro wide-angle segment." In November 2023, Insta360 released the Ace and Ace Pro, its first integrated wide-angle action cameras. Adopting the traditional single-body form of action cameras, they featured Leica lenses, 1/1.3-inch sensors, and flip screens, targeting the GoPro HERO series. In 2024, Insta360's overall revenue scale surpassed GoPro's for the first time. In the action camera market, DJI's global market share reached 66% in Q3 2025, surpassing GoPro to become the new global leader.
Once both surpassed GoPro in their respective specific fields, they became direct adversaries. Therefore, Insta360's high-profile entry into the panoramic drone sector in 2025 merely pushed this long-latent border war into an open, head-on confrontation, also underpinned by the gradual maturation of Insta360's technical capabilities.
Looking back to 2022, Insta360 released the "Tong Sphere" drone panoramic camera, an external accessory device specifically compatible with DJI's mainstream Mavic Air 2 and Air 2S models, relying on DJI's mature flight platform for implementation. At that time, Insta360 entered the sector in the role of an accessory ecosystem player. By December 2025, the officially launched Yingling A1 drone was a completely autonomous flight platform.
This leapfrog iteration relied not only on pure technical accumulation but also on directly poaching core talent from DJI. Core competitiveness in the hardware industry stems from R&D teams, exhibiting significant team agglomeration effects. When a core lead jumps ship, it often triggers a collective migration of the original core team. To quickly bridge the technical gap in the drone field, Insta360 continuously absorbed core drone R&D talent from DJI, including Niu Wei, the project lead for the Yingling drone. Public information shows that Niu Wei worked at DJI for about eight years, fully experiencing DJI's transition from professional-grade to consumer-grade portable drones and deeply participating in the R&D of two generations of DJI drone products.
This "precision poaching" strategy, while shortening the window for technical accumulation, brought rapidly growing financial burdens and inevitable legal risks. In 2025, Insta360's R&D expenses reached RMB 1.530 billion, a sharp increase of 96.95% year-over-year, nearly doubling, and exceeding the total of the three years from 2022 to 2024. In Q1 2026, Insta360 accelerated its R&D investment, with single-quarter R&D expenses of RMB 465 million, a year-over-year increase of 100.59%.
Seeing its key personnel poached, DJI naturally did not sit idly by. On March 23 this year, DJI sued Insta360 in Shenzhen. The case involves six patent ownership disputes in technical fields like drone flight control, structural design, and image processing. These relate to inventions created within one year after multiple former core DJI R&D personnel left the company, closely related to their job duties at DJI. The lawsuit has been accepted for filing.
According to DJI's complaint, in two patents involving drone flight control and structural design, Insta360's Chinese application text listed some inventors as "requesting not to publish name." However, in corresponding international patent applications, the real name of this inventor was mandatorily listed. The hidden name belonged to a former DJI R&D employee who had participated in key DJI drone projects during their tenure. This background makes it difficult to disentangle related patent applications made after their departure from their work history at DJI. In an announcement released the same day, Insta360 also admitted that the involved employees joined the company within one year of leaving DJI.
DJI's countermeasures also extended to the supply chain ecosystem and industry influence, restraining Insta360 from the production support side, again reflecting barriers built on technical沉淀. Shortly after the official launch of the Yingling A1, Liu Jingkang released an internal letter stating that in the half-year before the drone's launch, 33 core suppliers were pressured by "a competitor's" exclusivity agreements—optical lenses, module structural components, chips... they had to choose sides or face direct supply cuts. Insta360 could only urgently switch suppliers, causing costs to skyrocket.
Having深耕 the drone industry for years, DJI has孵化和 bound a mature full industry chain support system. Upstream and downstream中小 suppliers depend on its vast procurement volume and long-term合作 orders, giving DJI absolute bargaining power and rule-setting authority in the industrial chain. When a tech company's technical influence is constrained, it undoubtedly casts a shadow of uncertainty over its future breakthrough capabilities.
**Two Genes, Two Weaknesses**
Liu Jingkang majored in software engineering and is known as the "Nanjing University Tech Emperor." Therefore, Insta360 inherently carries a distinct software基因. Its product design follows the philosophy of "software as the core, hardware as the carrier," building an ecosystem driven by software algorithms to lower the barrier for users creating professional videos. This is Insta360's strength and also its Achilles' heel.
No matter how strong the software, it ultimately runs on hardware. When it跨界的 from panoramic cameras into the drone sector, a series of "hard lessons" like flight control algorithms, power systems, and thermal design became mountains it must climb.
Wang Tao has a background in电机及电子工程学. DJI possesses a typical hardware基因, with hardware engineers constituting a very high proportion of its employee structure. Product definition is driven by technical feasibility, with core competitiveness built upon precise control of physical systems, further establishing an ecosystem through top-tier flight control algorithms, image transmission protocols, and imaging processing software systems.
DJI also has its own weaknesses. While it can replicate technology across multiple product lines like action cameras and gimbal cameras, it lacks the kind of "internet sensibility" that Insta360 has in software interaction, content ecosystems, and creative玩法.
In terms of scale, DJI is undoubtedly a giant. According to LatePost reports, DJI's sales exceeded RMB 80 billion in 2025, nearly ten times that of Insta360; profits were around RMB 20+ billion, twenty times that of Insta360. This appears to be a lopsided "asymmetric war." However, the giant's counterattack is not flawless.
Shortly after the launch of the DJI Osmo 360, it became embroiled in口碑 controversy. Consumers reported multiple product issues, including "lens fogging," severe image distortion in close-up shots, and the body being prone to overheating. Some users bluntly stated the Osmo 360 couldn't compete with Insta360. Seizing the opportunity, Liu Jingkang publicly commented on the "lens fogging" issue, stating, "DJI's fogging is an isolated case, please feel assured in your purchase." His words simultaneously amplified the opponent's mistake and promoted his own product.
Meanwhile, the price wars initiated by DJI also exposed issues in channel management. As mentioned earlier, DJI launched large-scale price cuts last year, making consumers who purchased within the previous month feel "backstabbed," leading to widespread dissatisfaction. Subsequent维权 efforts revealed that DJI had differential treatment for price protection policies between online and offline channels. Online channels typically enjoyed a "7-day price guarantee" service, while rules for offline stores were混乱: some only supported "partial price difference refund within 7 days," others refused refunds. In response, Liu Jingkang posted on Weibo again, suggesting that DJI's significant price cuts might be partly due to Insta360. To apologize, customers who purchased DJI products between October 2 and October 8 could晒 their order proof under his Weibo post to receive an RMB 100 Insta360 no-threshold voucher.
Insta360 seems to seize every opportunity to counterattack: product口碑, marketing借势, channel cracks... But scoring points in the court of public opinion is insufficient to translate into substantive market advantages. Even if Insta360's Yingling A1 performs well, users find it hard to trust that a new跨界 player can surpass the technical barriers DJI has built through long-term深耕.
GoPro serves as a mirror. Its self-developed Karma drone, launched in September 2016, faced frequent "crashes" due to battery failures, leading to a full recall just 16 days after launch, costing hundreds of millions of dollars. After re-launch in 2017, it could no longer compete with DJI, ultimately resulting in project解散 and department layoffs. In hardware sectors with极高 technical barriers,跨界 players who rely solely on brand buzz and initial product innovation, lacking long-term investment in core capabilities like supply chain and flight control algorithms, can easily溃败 after a高调 entry.
But the shots have been fired, and Insta360 has no choice but to continue this fight. Looking at its revenue structure, Insta360's profit base heavily relies on panoramic cameras. In 2025, revenue from consumer-grade smart imaging devices was RMB 8.516 billion, a year-over-year increase of 77.83%, accounting for 87.42% of total revenue. For Insta360, a single business难以支撑 long-term valuation and growth narratives, and the ceiling for panoramic cameras is within reach. According to IDC data, the global panoramic camera market size仅 broke $1.212 billion in 2025, approximately RMB 8.4 billion.
In contrast, for the consumer drone industry, data from咨询机构 Fortune Business Insights estimates the global consumer drone market size will grow from $5.89 billion (over RMB 40 billion) in 2025 to $15.65 billion (over RMB 100 billion) by 2034. DJI holds a稳固 position in the drone market but also faces the reality of slowing market growth. Market research firm QYResearch predicts that from 2025 to 2030, the global consumer drone market's compound annual growth rate will be around 8%, indicating the industry is beginning to告别 the era of high growth.
Regardless of the最终 outcome of this clash of titans, it may not be a bad thing for the industry and consumers. The price wars actively initiated by DJI have objectively accelerated market expansion, giving consumers more diverse choices and potentially altering the future competitive rules of the industry.
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