Post-GoPro Era: The three-way rivalry in the smart imaging industry has evolved into a two-horse race

In September 2026, GoPro, the originator of action cameras, was acquired for $285 million by an optical communications company. The acquisition consideration was only $285 million, while its market cap once peaked at $13 billion at its prime.

GoPro once had a brilliant track record: its revenue doubled year after year, its market value exceeded $10 billion, and its founder Nick Woodman was hailed as "the next Steve Jobs in the hardware industry." But in the end, it did not become the Apple of the imaging sector, instead becoming the second Nokia.

The story of GoPro provides an excellent sample for observing the current imaging market: how much a company earns in the short term depends on its cost, while how much a company is worth in the long run depends on its position in the final market landscape.

01

Lessons from GoPro

In 2002, Nick Woodman, a surfing enthusiast, strapped a camera to his wrist with a rubber band to record his surfing footage, which became the earliest source of inspiration for GoPro. Twelve years later in 2014, GoPro was listed on NASDAQ. In 2015, the company's revenue reached its peak of $1.62 billion, almost monopolizing the global action camera market.

However, after the peak, the decline came almost as fast as the rise. In the fourth quarter of the same year when its revenue peaked, GoPro recorded its first quarterly loss. In 2016, it ventured into the drone sector with the Karma, which was fully recalled 16 days after its launch due to battery failure, and exited the market less than two years after its launch.

The failure of Karma was only a superficial issue. The more fatal problem lay in the area where GoPro should have made the most efforts: its ecosystem.

Although Woodman publicly stated on multiple occasions that "we are a content production company," GoPro failed to deliver even the most basic supporting app. Users repeatedly complained that GoPro's editing software Quik had issues such as crashes, lags, and failure to render overly long footage — the official even suggested that users trim the footage before importing, as the software would crash if the video was too long. In 2024, GoPro simply removed the desktop version of Quik from the shelves, leaving desktop editing entirely to third-party providers.

On the other hand, its flagship Hero series has long been stuck in incremental, "tick-tack" updates. No sensor upgrades have been made since 2021, and issues including overheating and short battery life have never been resolved. With little to show for technological innovation, the brand has been losing its long-time users continuously.

In 2022, GoPro still dominated the global action camera market with an 84% share, but by the first three quarters of 2025, its share plummeted sharply to 18%, while DJI topped the market with a 66% share that year. In 2025, GoPro's full-year revenue was $652 million, down nearly 20% year on year. Its stock price fell from a peak of $93 to less than $2. From 2023 to 2025, it recorded a cumulative total loss of about $579 million (equivalent to about 3.9 billion RMB), which eventually led to its acquisition in 2026. What the buyer valued was not GoPro's camera business, but more than 2,500 US patents it held.

The pioneer of a product category was thus left behind by the era it had personally created. All this happened just because at the time when its short-term indicators were at their best, it did not invest to secure a more long-term position in the final market landscape.

02

Two Paths: Dimensionality Reduction Strike and Redefinition

While users kept complaining about the poor user experience of GoPro, two Chinese companies — Insta360 and DJI — quietly seized the market. By the time GoPro realized what was happening, the "three-way rivalry" had already turned into a two-horse race.

DJI leveraged its drone technology to enter the action camera and gimbal camera sectors via dimensionality reduction, and eventually took the top spot in the action camera market; Insta360 started from the panoramic camera track and has ranked first in the global panoramic camera market for years. The headquarters of the two Shenzhen-based companies are less than 10 kilometers apart, and each has redefined imaging tools from different directions.

DJI follows a path of "taking core technologies as the axis and radiating to adjacent product categories". Its Pocket series applies drone gimbal technology to ground shooting, with total sales exceeding 10 million units per generation; it expands from drones to action cameras, panoramic cameras, and robot vacuums, and each step is a migration of its proven technical capabilities to new product forms. DJI's moat lies in its hardware technologies accumulated in the drone era such as flight control, obstacle avoidance and navigation, representing its engineering capabilities and flight data accumulated over more than a decade.

Insta360 takes a different path. Its core technology system revolves around panoramic imaging: panoramic capture and stitching, image stabilization, AI image processing, and computational photography. It has independently developed three customized chips, with R&D personnel accounting for nearly 60% of its total workforce.

But what is more important than technology is its product definition capability.

The panoramic camera itself is a mass market segment carved out by Insta360. Before that, the logic of action cameras was "pre-emptive shooting": you had to decide the camera position, angle and composition in advance, and it was hard to remedy if you shot off-frame. With panoramic shooting and post-production reconstruction, Insta360 transforms shooting into "record first, create later": the device captures all the footage, and users can modify it according to their needs in post-production. There is no need to adjust the angle repeatedly, and no need to worry about missing precious moments.

Starting from product definition, everything Insta360 does is changing the way users "shoot" and "use" imaging devices. For example, its invisible selfie stick uses panoramic algorithms to hide the stick in the footage, so that the footage shot by users holding the stick looks as if it is being followed and shot by a drone. Another example is the Snap selfie screen, a magnetic screen attached to the back of the mobile phone, which enables real-time preview when taking selfies with the rear camera, solving the pain point of blind shooting for mobile phone users. This is product definition capability: not just making a better product, but making a different product.

At present, the moats of both companies are shifting from hardware to software and ecosystems. After all, a hardware lead can only last for half a year. Once competitors catch up, the gap in parameters will be bridged quickly. But the moat formed by software and ecosystem is compound and difficult to imitate.

DJI is promoting its self-developed 3D stacked AI chip for on-device inference, moving AI computing capabilities from the cloud down to the device itself; Insta360 is making efforts on the cloud side, and has jointly developed the "Moments Pro" feature with AWS. Users can input a sentence such as "I want to edit a video of moments with my kid", and the system will automatically search for footage, identify highlights, arrange background music, and generate a finished video directly. The two companies are extending the relationship between users and devices in different dimensions: users keep editing after shooting, and keep shooting after editing, so the more they use the product, the higher the migration cost will be.

At the same time, both companies are continuously occupying positions in multiple new markets. DJI is expanding to panoramic cameras and robot vacuums; Insta360 is expanding to gimbal cameras, drones, and camera robots.

03

The Final Landscape: Irreplaceable in Respective Tracks

In the past two years, Insta360 and DJI have been competing head-to-head across multiple tracks including panoramic cameras, action cameras, gimbal cameras, and drones, from product benchmarking to price competition. So what will the final landscape of the imaging market look like? Will it become a duopoly?

Probably not.

Traditional duopolies, such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi, divide the cake in the same market. They are competing for the same demand: when a consumer who wants to drink cola drinks one bottle of your product, they will drink one less bottle of mine. This is a blatant zero-sum game. The difference between DJI and Insta360 is that they did not cut the same piece of cake from the very beginning. DJI's core demand is "flying": it builds its technology system around aerial scenarios; Insta360's core demand is "shooting": it builds its technology system around the full chain of content creation.

The two companies do have overlapping product categories such as action cameras and gimbal cameras, but overlap does not mean homogeneity: when DJI develops panoramic cameras, it adopts the idea of applying flight control technologies via dimensionality reduction; when Insta360 develops drones, it adopts the idea of extending imaging algorithms. The two companies have different underlying technical genes, different user perceptions, and different ecosystem lock-in. That is why it is hard for each to replace the other's core moat in their respective home turfs. DJI's flight control system relies on more than a decade of flight data and safety verification; Insta360's creation ecosystem relies on its in-depth understanding of every link from shooting to sharing.

Therefore, the more likely form of the final landscape is that DJI and Insta360 each become irreplaceable in their own dimensions, continue to compete in overlapping product categories, and maintain a market with an undetermined pattern for a long time.

The competition has not yet reached a conclusion. Whoever continues to invest in strengthening its own moat will be able to secure a favorable position when the final landscape arrives. In this case, what enterprises need is exactly continuous investment in R&D.

In the first half of 2026, Insta360's R&D investment exceeded 1 billion RMB, accounting for 18.78% of its revenue; it made strategic chip reserves of nearly 2 billion RMB; its strategic investment in new product categories reached 762 million RMB, equivalent to 80% of its attributable net profit in the same period. These figures do not look good on the profit statement, but from the perspective of the final market landscape, they are all necessary bets to secure a position a decade later.

GoPro also made investments: it acquired editing apps, launched self-developed chips, and offered subscription services. But its investments did not form a moat — the editing software it acquired still delivered a poor experience, its self-developed chips failed to turn the tide, and subscription revenue could not fill the gap caused by shrinking hardware business. Insta360's investment direction has always focused on imaging algorithms and creation ecosystems, while DJI's investment has always focused on flight control and hardware performance. The two companies are continuously stacking capabilities on their respective core moats, which is the difference between "making strategic bets" and "burning money".

Conclusion

In industries where the final landscape has not yet taken shape, the biggest risk lies in not making investments. GoPro failed to improve its software ecosystem and successfully expand its second growth curve when it was the most profitable, and by the time its short-term indicators started to deteriorate, it was already too late to make up for the gaps.

The new category expansion and ecosystem construction of Insta360 and DJI today are not aimed at pursuing quarterly profits. DJI is expanding from drones to handheld shooting devices, and Insta360 is expanding from panoramic cameras to drones and camera robots — both are positioning themselves for the final market landscape. The market may question the pace of a company, but it is difficult to question the direction of an industry.