Cross-border competition: A new trick in China's technology industry

In the past few months, a very interesting drama has been staged in China's tech circle.

On October 8th, DJI suddenly announced across - the - board price cuts, with the maximum reduction of popular products exceeding 1,400 yuan. As a result, Liu Jingkang, the CEO of Insta360, immediately posted on Weibo saying "warm congratulations" on DJI's new product launch, and then Insta360 directly cut the price of its Insta360 X5 by 500 yuan for a limited time. Subsequently, Insta360 officially launched the public beta phase 1 of its "InstaA1" drone on August 14th, clearly aiming to enter DJI's territory.

This seemingly price - war competition actually hides a bigger trend behind it - Chinese manufacturing enterprises are no longer satisfied with just operating in their own niches. Everyone is peeping into others' fields.

OPPO has confirmed its entry into the handheld intelligent imaging device market and plans to launch new products in 2026; vivo has established a robotics lab to make great achievements in the field of household robots; Dreame has expanded from high - speed motors to personal care products and launched multiple new products this year; XGIMI has also started to develop intelligent cockpit projectors, aiming to gain a share in the in - vehicle display field.

Seeing this, you may ask: What's wrong with these enterprises? The manufacturing industry is already highly competitive. Why don't they focus on their own businesses and instead try to "grab food" from others?

Actually, the phenomenon of cross - border operations has long existed in China. However, in the past decade, cases like Huawei entering the automotive industry, BYD manufacturing batteries, and CATL producing energy storage products were all cross - border moves, but they belonged to "vertical integration" - in simple terms, they were extensions around their main business and were carried out during the high - speed development stage of the sub - industries.

For example, BYD's expansion from batteries to complete vehicles and then to semiconductors was achieved during the period when the penetration rate of new energy vehicles was rising from 5% to 40%.

Huawei's move from communication equipment to mobile phones and then to intelligent driving was promoted during the global 5G infrastructure construction and the smartphone dividend period.

What's different this year is that in 2025, Insta360, with an annual revenue of 550 million yuan, dared to conduct a public beta of its drone. Enterprises like Dreame, Roborock, and XGIMI, with revenues below 1 billion yuan, are also making horizontal breakthroughs.

The reason behind this is that AI, modular hardware, and cloud services have lowered the threshold for cross - border operations. You don't need to develop your own flight control system. You can use open - source solutions + self - developed algorithms to enter the market.

So, in today's increasingly competitive Chinese manufacturing industry, is this kind of cross - border integration a good remedy or a bigger internal strife?

Good Remedy or Internal Strife?

The more important reason for the wave of cross - border operations this year is that the previous "vertical deep - diving" model has reached its limit, and enterprises have to "find an exit".

Will such cross - border operations just make the competition even more intense? Not really. The biggest feature of Insta360's "InstaA1" drone is not its flight control technology (which is indeed not as good as DJI's), but its panoramic shooting and somatosensory interaction. Users can control the shooting angle of the drone by turning their heads while wearing special glasses, and the 8K panoramic video can be freely adjusted in composition after shooting.

This is a brilliant move. It doesn't compete with DJI in terms of flight stability but creates a new usage scenario. DJI's price cut is more like a test to see if users really want this "new experience". Now look at OPPO. This mobile phone manufacturer announced its entry into the handheld imaging device market in 2026, targeting DJI and GoPro. You may think that it's a big leap for a mobile phone manufacturer to make cameras. But think about it carefully. How many years has OPPO been investing in mobile phone imaging? Hasselblad tuning, super - light engine, AI algorithm optimization... These technological accumulations are just suitable for professional imaging devices, aren't they?

So, you can see that these enterprises' cross - border operations actually have one thing in common: They don't simply "grab others' jobs" but apply the core technologies they have accumulated in one field to other fields, achieving the effect of "getting multiple uses from one resource".

Actually, from an industrial perspective, this phenomenon is not internal strife but an inevitable industrial integration when a country's manufacturing industry develops to a certain stage.

This is because: The development of the manufacturing industry is essentially a process of taming complexity. When complexity reaches a certain limit, the system can no longer solve problems by "adding components" and must shift to "structural reconstruction".

Cross - border enterprises are manifestations of this "structural reconstruction".

Benefits of Cross - border Operations

When talking about industrial integration, I have to mention Elon Musk. Although this guy sometimes seems to be making empty promises, he is simultaneously involved in Tesla electric vehicles, SpaceX rockets, Neuralink brain - computer interfaces, and the AI company xAI, and he has actually succeeded in all of them. Moreover, these businesses can empower each other. For example, the visual algorithm used in Tesla's FSD (Full Self - Driving) system was later applied to the humanoid robot Optimus. The battery management technology of rockets, in turn, optimized the endurance of electric vehicles. This "technological compound interest" effect has enabled Musk's corporate empire to form a "self - cycling ecosystem" - A breakthrough in one field can be quickly replicated to other fields, significantly reducing R & D costs. Has China's manufacturing industry reached a stage where it needs this kind of "Musk - style" cross - border integrated enterprise? I think the answer is yes. However, what we need is not a "genius" like Musk but the model of cross - border integration.