“Born To Be Global”: China’s Insta360 Plans U.S., Europe Camera Stores
Men early on led the market for action cameras, but a gender gap has narrowed as the products are embraced by a widening spectrum of users in everyday life, researchers say.
Insta360
The fast-growing China-headquartered company behind the action camera brand Insta360 is gearing up to open its first retail stores in the U.S., Europe and Japan as part of an expansion of overseas business this year.
In the U.S., Insta360 – whose formal name is Arashi Vision — aims to open a store in New York in the Times Square area in the third quarter of this year, co-founder and marketing vice president Max Richter said in an interview on Friday.
“What’s quite exciting about New York is there’s a strong community of users and creators,” in addition to a lifestyle community already buying its action cameras through online sites such as Amazon or offline at retail stores that include Best Buy, he said. The company is also planning to open its doors in Tokyo and Munich, a push that will help Insta360 take on rivals GoPro and DJI globally.
Founded in 2015, Insta360 is representative of a new generation of mainland Chinese businesses going global. “They’re born to be a global company, as opposed to many of the previous generation of Chinese companies that actually grew to be really big in China before they started to explore their brands outside,” says Joe Ngai, chairman of McKinsey & Co. in Greater China.
“Taken the fight to GoPro”
“The way how they have evolved and how they have taken the fight to GoPro is fascinating because you have kind of China speed coming up against a good incumbent. And when you start seeing the company globally, it’s one of these things where people are not thinking so much whether this (company) is actually from China or not” because its products are marketed as “a very cool sports adventure gadget” that’s also used in sports arenas and other settings, he said.
The international moves come amid rapid sales growth. Sales last year soared by 74% to the equivalent of $1.4 billion. In the first quarter of 2026, they gained another 83% to 2.48 billion yuan, or $366 million, from 1.35 billion yuan a year earlier; international revenue accounted for more than 60% of the total, Richter said. However, net profit in the first three months of 2026 fell to 36 million yuan from 174 million yuan in part because of heavy research spending. The fall in profit has hurt its Shanghai-listed shares, which have lost a quarter of their value in the past year.
Insta360, whose camera allow users to record 360-degree movements by video, is chasing a global action camera market worth $7.3 billion in 2025, and is projected to grow 12% annually to $18 billion by 2033, according to a report last month by Grand View Research of San Francisco. Growth in sales of action and panoramic cameras is primarily driven by rising consumer demand for ultra-high-definition video recording, advances in electronic and AI-based image stabilization and “increasing preference for rugged, waterproof, and shock-resistant camera designs, which are supporting adoption across extreme outdoor environments,” Grand View said.
Founded by Chinese geek
Insta360 was founded by a young Chinese geek, Liu Jingkang, known as “JK,” who became a billionaire at age 33 when Insta360 listed at the Shanghai Stock Exchange last June, after attracting investment backing over the years from IDG and Qiming Venture Partners. Liu is worth $1.9 billion on the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires list today.
Insta360’s Max Richter, left, and JK Liu, right.
Insta360
Richter, who hails from Germany, joined as a co-founder in 2016 after working at Insta360 rival DJI – also headquartered in the China tech hub Shenzhen, a city that is also home to domestic giants such as Huawei and Tencent. “It’s an amazing place to build hardware,” he said. “I also then got to know the founding team of Insta360 with JK. And that’s ultimately how I got convinced from him about the potential of 360 cameras and the potential of Insta360’s future technologies,” Richter said.
For its part, bigger unlisted DJI, a maker of cameras as well as its flagship drones, is reportedly suing Insta360 for patent infringement. (Instra said it respects the legal process and wouldn’t comment on the specific details at this time.) Shares in struggling GoPro, once an emblem of California’s start-up scene, have lost about 99% of their value from their 2014 peak, a plunge that underscores a volatile camera industry whose faded one-time icons include U.S. makers Kodak and Polaroid.
Insta360’s products include not only simple cameras but also gimbal models that help keep images stable while the subject is moving. Customers include buyers interested in sports, travelers, as well as vloggers, Richter said. Another potentially growing group, he believes, is young parents: one video shot with a Insta360 model atop a young child’s head last year received 42 million likes on Instagram.
The company has done well by paying “a lot of attention about what is the actual software experience and how people can actually make use of all the footage that our cameras are creating,” he said.
Rapidly evolving AI technology is helping to widen the global population of digital content creators. “Computational imaging” is lowering the barriers for content crea00tors to capture and share footage, Richter said. “You can use these AI algorithms to optimize the image quality,” a big plus for social media users, he said.
Adding Chinese distribution
The opening of Insta360 retail stores overseas will expand its customer base, Richter believes. “There’s still a lot of opportunity just to increase the availability and the connection with the local consumer,’’ he said. Insta360 cameras are available through a global network of more than 10,000 locations including Apple Authorized Retailers; this month it added 44 Honor locations in China, and expects to expand to 300 stores in the chain by the end of the year. The new brand stores in the U.S. and Europe will “have an opportunity to really explain our technology because a lot of the times we do very innovative products, and they require a lot of user education,” he said.
The move into New York adds to a U.S. Insta360 office in Los Angeles. “We choose New York is because we already have a strong presence in L.A.,” Richter said. “But we missed a bit of the east side footprint.”
“What makes Munich quite exciting also is that there’s a strong outdoor sports community — an active lifestyle community,” he said. “We’re also actively expanding our resort partnerships. For example, we’ve been partnering with one of the biggest ski resorts in Europe.” That overlaps with a growing ski and outdoor sports market in China, too – another growth target.
