DJI has officially escalated its direct competition with Insta360 in core business areas into a legal counterattack by filing a lawsuit with the Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court in Guangdong Province. The case involves disputes over the ownership of six patents, focusing on key technologies such as drone flight control, structural design, and image processing. The court has formally accepted the case. This marks the first time DJI has initiated such a patent ownership dispute domestically, highlighting the significance and intensity of the case.

In the lawsuit, DJI claims that the patents in question were inventions created by former employees within one year of their departure, which are closely related to the tasks they performed during their tenure at DJI. On March 23, Liu Jingkang, founder and CEO of Insta360, responded on social media, stating, "Regarding DJI's lawsuit against Insta360, everyone should just wait for the court's standard evidence collection and investigation procedures. This kind of litigation is quite common among competing tech companies. The majority of our resources will still be dedicated to launching seven or eight new products and series this year." He specifically mentioned, "To protect our legitimate rights, we previously spent over $10 million to win a case against GoPro overseas. Our mindset is the same this time."

This sudden legal battle reveals the tip of the iceberg in the increasingly intense cross-market competition between Insta360 and DJI. In recent years, Insta360 has made significant strides in the global market with its panoramic cameras, even achieving dominant positions in specific segments. However, when Insta360 ambitiously attempted to enter DJI's core territory with panoramic drones, it encountered not only product and ecosystem countermeasures from DJI but also a legal and patent offensive targeting core technologies.

As the global leader in consumer drones, DJI's lawsuit serves as a strong defense of its core technological assets and a clear message to the market: Insta360's gamble on drones, aimed at breaking through its own growth ceiling, comes with extremely high costs. For DJI, the drone market represents an absolute no-go zone where it has built significant technological barriers. If Insta360 achieved its progress through "improper technology transfer," it would undoubtedly provoke a strong reaction.

In this case, several former key R&D employees of DJI are alleged to be involved, and Insta360's practice of concealing inventors' names in domestic patent applications has become a focal point. Liu Jingkang responded, "Insta360 often hides inventor names in domestic patent applications, disclosing them only in PCT filings. This is done to respect the inventors and delay the exposure of our technical team to headhunters, which is the original purpose of this system. We have many patent applications that also conceal the names of non-former DJI employees."

Liu Jingkang stated that DJI's demand is for ownership of all patents filed by former employees within one year of leaving the company. "We have carefully reviewed the patents filed by the involved employees during that period, and existing evidence shows they were all based on ideas and independent innovations developed at Insta360." Additionally, Liu Jingkang pointed out that most of the related drone patent applications were filed four or five years ago, and due to significant changes in product definitions since then, many of these patents are no longer in use.

In July of last year, Insta360 first announced its entry into the drone industry, planning to launch two drone brands, including its own brand and a co-developed panoramic drone brand named "Yingling Antigravity." By the end of last year, Insta360 officially released the world's first panoramic drone, the Yingling A1. This direct competition with DJI is undoubtedly costly. Insta360's R&D expenses in the third quarter of last year reached 524 million yuan, a 164.81% year-on-year increase, nearly matching the 560 million yuan invested in the first half of the year. For the full year, total R&D expenditure amounted to 1.65 billion yuan, up 112.4% year-on-year.

According to Insta360's 2025 performance report, its annual revenue increased by 76.58% to approximately 9.86 billion yuan, but net profit attributable to shareholders decreased by 3% to 960 million yuan. The outbreak of the patent dispute is seen as a strong countermeasure by DJI against Insta360's "crossing the line" into drone manufacturing. In the highly competitive consumer electronics sector, using patent litigation to deter competitors has long been a key strategy for industry giants to protect their interests.

Insta360 recently emerged from a legal battle with traditional action camera giant GoPro. In March 2024, GoPro filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC), alleging that Insta360 and its U.S. subsidiary infringed six of its U.S. intellectual property rights, covering both invention and design patents. In response, Insta360 established a dedicated task force, introduced compliant new designs, and filed a patent infringement lawsuit against GoPro's entities in China. It was not until February 2026 that the ITC issued a final ruling, declaring three of the involved invention patents invalid or partially invalid and finding no infringement, while dismissing most of the remaining patent claims, allowing Insta360 to narrowly retain its sales rights in the U.S. market.

Liu Jingkang commented, "We completely understand the mindset of giants like GoPro and DJI when they see their market share being challenged." Having just extricated itself from GoPro's patent disputes, Insta360 now finds itself embroiled in another legal battle with DJI, which is also expected to be a protracted struggle. DJI's lawsuit follows a similar logic to GoPro's earlier actions—using intellectual property as a sharp weapon to block competitors from encroaching on its core domain.

DJI has long held over 70% of the global consumer drone market, with more than a decade of accumulated expertise in flight control, transmission, and structural technologies. As a latecomer, Insta360 has been preparing its drone strategy for years. Since July 1, 2020, Insta360 has registered multiple patents related to "drones" and "panoramic drones," covering areas such as drone structure, propellers, and power systems.

The reason behind Insta360's high-stakes bet on the drone sector lies in the growth ceiling it faces in the panoramic camera market and the ambitious vision of its founder, Liu Jingkang. In last year's interim report, Insta360's management also cited the larger market scale and unmet demand in the drone category as reasons for entering the market, noting its sufficient potential for business growth.

Regarding DJI as a formidable competitor, Liu Jingkang once remarked that DJI is far more powerful than it appears or than most people realize. He stated, "When making the decision, we anticipated that this move might provoke DJI to develop panoramic cameras as a countermeasure. Even at that potential cost, we chose to set sail five years ago."

The launch of the Yingling A1 was fraught with challenges. Shortly after its release, the product was criticized for sluggish sales. However, Liu Jingkang disputed this, citing data showing that Yingling sales in China alone exceeded 30 million yuan within 48 hours. By January 4, 2026, over 30,000 units of the Yingling A1 had been shipped in its first month. Despite Insta360's efforts to demonstrate its foothold in the drone market, it still faces significant challenges in establishing a firm position in this field.

An analyst from Galaxy Securities noted that while the Yingling A1 has a novel product positioning, its supply chain lacks economies of scale, resulting in higher costs, and its flight experience falls short of DJI's offerings. In the vast landscape of technology, for Insta360 to truly fly alongside industry giants, it may need to endure a prolonged and costly period of growing pains.