Insta360 pays for the next Insta360

By | Ban Jun

Insta360 released its half-year report. In the first half of the year, its revenue reached 5.5 billion yuan, with a net profit of 30.4 million yuan.

The net profit margin is only 0.55%. For every 100 yuan of goods sold, it earns less than 0.6 yuan.

What is more unusual is that its revenue is still rising, with a year-on-year increase of 50%.

A company that is growing at a rapid pace has suddenly seen its profits plummet to a very low level.

On the face of it, this is a typical financial report that shows rising revenue but no corresponding profit growth.

However, the funds Insta360 has spent this year are pushing it toward a path completely different from its past development.

1. Insta360 Has Changed

10 million units is a figure that can easily be written as a reason for celebration.

As of now, the total global cumulative shipment of Insta360 cameras has exceeded 10 million units, there are more than 10,000 global experience retail stores, and over 300 brand flagship stores. In the first half of the year, overseas main business revenue accounted for 63.40% of the total main business revenue.

Cumulative global shipments of 10 million units (the camera category it created itself has been truly widely sold)

More than 10,000 global experience retail stores (sales channels have been fully deployed in the real world)

Over 300 brand flagship stores

Overseas revenue accounts for 63.40% (more than 60% of revenue comes from overseas markets)

Insta360 has accomplished a very difficult task: the camera category it created has been truly sold to markets all over the world.

Over the years, what Insta360 is best at is identifying an unmet imaging demand that has not been fully satisfied, and then turning it into a new consumer product category. This is how panoramic cameras, thumb-sized cameras came into being, and action cameras and gimbal cameras are also continuously expanding its business boundaries.

Liu Jingkang, the founder of Insta360, previously mentioned that more than 60% of the company's revenue comes from new segmented product categories defined by Insta360 itself.

The past growth logic is very clear: identify new product categories, develop corresponding products, and then sell them to a sufficiently large market.

But after the cumulative shipment volume reached 10 million units, the situation began to change. Insta360 has already done a very good job in selling cameras.

After the shipment of 10 million units, a real new problem has emerged. What more can happen after these cameras are sold out?

Luna Ultra has entered the gimbal camera market, Luna Pro continues to expand vertical shooting scenarios, X6 has updated its panoramic imaging capabilities, Go Ultra is equipped with an AI voice assistant, and panoramic drones have entered a brand new product field.

Looking at all these products together, Insta360 is evolving from "selling hardware devices" to "operating the entire imaging process after the devices are sold".

This step is more difficult than launching another hit product. It also costs far more money.

2. Where Did the Profits Go?

Looking back at the 30.4 million yuan profit figure, you will find another layer of meaning behind it.

There are of course real operational pressures.

In the first half of the year, the prices of global memory chips such as DDR continued to rise, and Insta360 also made a strategic procurement of memory chips worth nearly 2 billion yuan; panoramic drones are still in the market education stage, and investment is required in R&D, production line construction and channel expansion.

R&D expenses exceed 1 billion yuan (up nearly 80% year on year, close to one fifth of total revenue)

Strategic procurement of memory chips reaches nearly 2 billion yuan

Panoramic drones are in the market education stage, with continuous investment in R&D, production lines and channels, and no corresponding revenue generated for the moment

At the same time, R&D expenses exceeded 1 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of nearly 80%, close to one fifth of the operating revenue. Insta360's profits have been compressed layer by layer amid these active investments and external cost pressures.

However, one detail is worth noting: Insta360 has actively increased the proportion of fixed costs in its cost structure when its revenue is growing at a high speed.

In 2025, its revenue increased by 74.76%, and R&D investment increased by about 97%; in the first quarter of 2026, revenue continued to grow by 83.11%, and R&D investment increased by about 101% year on year. This means that the profit pressure did not happen suddenly. Insta360 has been devoting more resources to new products and new growth directions for a continuous period of time.

3. What Are These Funds Paying For?

The most interesting point of Insta360 now is that the money it spends is increasingly not used to maintain its old business. All these funds point to the same change: what Insta360 wants to do has gone far beyond manufacturing a camera.

The X6 is a very good example. It is of course still a panoramic camera, but more capabilities that originally belonged to software and AI have been embedded in the product: automatic video editing, 3D Gaussian splatting, and the PanoMind multimodal model trained for different scenarios. When cameras begin to undertake the work that was originally completed by humans, their functional boundaries will continue to expand.

Liu Jingkang talked about the future "photography robot" at WAIC this year, and described a very interesting scenario:

In the future, there will be a type of hardware that can act as a companion, automatically complete framing, snapshotting and video production, so that users can refocus their attention on the scenery in front of them and the things happening around them.

This has actually pushed the definition of "camera" a big step forward.

Cameras are evolving from recording tools to recording agents.

At this point, what Insta360 needs is no longer just better lenses, larger sensors and stronger image stabilization capabilities. It needs software, models, data, and a system that can continuously learn users' usage habits.

Insta360 is paying R&D costs in advance for a new product form.

4. After the 10 Million Unit Shipment Milestone

10 million units. For Insta360, it has another meaning: these devices have already been distributed in the real world.

They are taken by users for travel, skiing, cycling, diving, and shooting videos of their children, and also record a large number of daily life moments. The devices continuously generate content, users continuously use the App, files are continuously exported, and more and more people begin to use cloud services. The original one-time hardware transaction has a subsequent operational stage.

Users continue to edit the footage after shooting, and continue to store the edited content after editing, which extends the relationship between the devices and the users. This is the truly imaginative part brought by the 10 million unit shipment volume.

Monthly active users of the App increased by 67%

Number of exported files increased by 126%

Paying users of cloud storage services increased by 124%

Once the hardware scale is large enough, the software will have a fertile ground for development. The more software users there are, the richer the real usage feedback will be, and the more opportunities there will be for products and AI capabilities to continue to iterate. Insta360's current App data has shown this positive trend.

These figures are not yet sufficient to prove that Insta360 has established a mature software business model. But one thing is certain: the user relationship does not end after the camera is sold. This is likely to be the most valuable asset that Insta360 needs to operate in the next stage.

5. The Camera Is Only an Entry Point

It is easy to understand why Insta360 is still expanding its sales channels at a rapid pace when you look at all the above information together.

The flagship store in Asakusa, Tokyo has been opened, and the directly-operated flagship store in Times Square, New York is expected to open in September. At the same time, Insta360 has entered more Apple authorized reseller stores, and has cooperated with channels such as Costco, Sam's Club, Best Buy, B&H and other retailers. On the surface, Insta360 is selling cameras to more places.

More importantly, it is placing its products in more pre-existing consumer scenarios. Travel, sports, Vlog, family recording, these originally scattered imaging demands have all become scenarios where Insta360 can reach its users.

This is also one of the differences between Insta360 and many AI hardware companies. Many AI hardware products are still looking for a scenario that users are willing to use every day. Insta360 already has a very specific scenario: users pick up the camera and walk into the real world.

It even has more than 10 million such real connections. Therefore, the truly valuable direction for Insta360 to develop AI is not to add an extra function to the camera. What it ultimately wants to change is the entire recording process.

When to shoot, which frames are worth keeping, and how to edit the final footage, all these tasks originally need to be done manually by a person. In the future, more and more links in this process will be completed by machines.

At that stage, the camera will only be an entry point.

6. These Investments Have Not Yet Generated Returns

The problem is that none of these investments have started to make profits yet.

To regain a firm foothold in the gimbal camera market, continuous investment in AI infrastructure is required, and all these investments have not generated corresponding revenue for the moment.

If all these investments only bring more products and SKUs in the end, Insta360 may be dragged down by its own expansion. The ideal state is that these investments start to generate mutual value.

New hardware products first attract users. The more footage users shoot, the more things the software can do, and the AI will get more real usage feedback. After the experience is improved, it will in turn promote the next purchase. Once this cycle operates smoothly, the current high investment will be truly meaningful.

What Insta360 most needs to prove now is not whether a certain new product can be a hit. It needs to prove that it is forming a new growth model.

Insta360 has already mastered the complete logic of identifying new product categories, developing hit products, and selling them globally.

The model of retaining users with hardware first, and then keeping users engaged with software, AI and data is still being verified.

7. Insta360 Is No Longer Just a Camera Company

I increasingly feel that today's Insta360 can no longer be understood only with the analytical framework of a traditional hardware company. The core asset of a camera company is usually successive generations of products.

What Insta360 really wants to accumulate now has gone beyond the products themselves. (Extended reading:The More Successful Insta360 Is, The More It Needs to Break Away From the Camera Business)

If devices, software, algorithms and data can finally be interconnected, what it faces is no longer just competition for the next generation of camera products, but competition for a complete imaging system. The part of this half-year report that is really worth paying attention to is exactly the content beyond the profit statement.

Insta360 is actively transforming a hardware company that has already achieved stable operation into a company with heavier assets, more complex business, and greater development potential. This process will inevitably sacrifice part of the short-term profits. It is still too early to make a final judgment on Insta360 now.

The 10 million cameras prove the achievements of Insta360 in the past

The 5.5 billion yuan revenue proves the current strength of Insta360

The 30.4 million yuan profit leaves questions for the future development of Insta360

The real question is whether these investments can nurture a new Insta360 with stronger competitiveness.

[Beyond the Layout] Remarks:

In the past, to evaluate a hardware company, people mainly looked at its sales volume, profit and market share.

In the AI era, we may need to pay attention to one more thing. After its devices enter the real world, what value do they leave behind? More users and data, or a set of continuously evolving product capabilities?

This is also the real problem that Insta360 is facing after the shipment of 10 million units.

Selling out products is the end of the hardware business. Making the sold products continue to create value is the possible starting point for the next stage of development.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Beyond the Layout", author: Ban Jun, authorized for release by 36Kr.