Liu Jingkang, founder of Yingshi Innovation (also known as “Yingshi Insta360”), angrily criticized a certain company for “maliciously poaching people” in his social media and WeChat posts. He stated that the company is implementing the “Finger Cutting Plan” internally, using three times the salary to poach employees from friendly businesses in the sweeping machine industry, obtaining trade secrets, and then firing them three months later.
A source familiar with the matter revealed that the company implementing the “Finger Cutting Plan” or a robotic vacuum cleaner company in Suzhou is incubating imaging related products such as sports cameras and has also contacted employees from Yingshi and DJI. This may be the origin of this dispute. Yingshi and DJI are both global manufacturers of sports camera heads.
Several industry insiders in the sweeping machine industry told Interface News that the company’s “finger cutting plan” is well-known in the industry, with a focus on research and development positions. Initiating non compete is also useless because the other party does not directly sign agreements with employees, but instead establishes a company with completely unrelated business through a contract. We currently have a lot of non compete lawsuits being handled
The executive also stated that high salary poaching is normal, but the act of firing someone after obtaining core technical information is not honorable. Not only has it affected the progress of many projects in the company, disrupted the pace of product releases, but it has also indirectly increased the cost of technological innovation for hardware enterprises. It’s not a good thing for employees either. Colleagues are increasingly afraid to hire people from this company, and basically your career in this industry is over
Sports cameras have experienced rapid growth in the past few years. The “2024 Global Smart Handheld Imaging Device Market Development White Paper” released by Frost&Sullivan shows that the market size of consumer grade handheld intelligent imaging devices, including panoramic cameras and motion cameras, has grown from 16.43 billion yuan in 2017 to 36.47 billion yuan in 2023, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.2%.
The American brand GoPro is known as the pioneer in the field of sports cameras. However, with the hot sales of the sports camera category, Sony HTC、 New players such as Insta360, DJI, and Xiaomi have also started to leave one after another, quickly eroding GoPro’s market share.
In 2023, GoPro’s global sales of sports cameras reached 1.01 billion US dollars, ranking first. However, from Q3 2022 to Q1 2024, GoPro experienced six consecutive quarters of revenue decline. Founder Liu Jingkang of Yingshi once stated on his social media that Yingshi grew fourfold during the four-year period of IPO application (2020-2024), from only 1/40 of industry leader GoPro in 2017 to surpassing it in the first half of 2024.
Interface News has reported that Yingshi’s revenue in 2023 is close to 4 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of nearly 100%, with overseas market revenue accounting for about 80%. From the demand side, North America and Europe are the largest markets for sports cameras, with North America accounting for about half of the market share, while the Chinese market has a relatively small share.
A person in the imaging industry believes that the performance of sports cameras is highly dependent on the upstream supply chain, and the technical barriers of the product itself are not high, which further tests the manufacturer’s control ability, marketing ability, and user operation ability of the product. This also provides opportunities for newcomers.
One example is that GoPro once vigorously promoted the “machine sea tactic”, but its product positioning was not clear, and even cut off the most basic screen configuration in mid to low end products. It also vigorously transformed into content services after its launch, but these strategies ultimately failed.
During this period, Yingshi, founded in 2015, launched products with similar functions but more cost-effective, and also took the lead in launching panoramic cameras compatible with iPhone and Android phones, cultivating a unique product audience. DJI, which entered the sports camera market in 2019, quickly opened up the market with its first product, Osmo Action, based on its technology and brand accumulation in the drone industry.
But from the above perspective, the ceiling of the sports camera market is also very clear. The market for sports cameras is only about 40 billion yuan, and its growth is currently slowing down. I don’t think new brands can make a big impact unless they can come up with the necessary innovation to replace mobile phone imaging. The advantages of sweeping machine manufacturers may lie in algorithms and marketing, but making cameras still requires some accumulation and understanding of imaging
In the sports camera industry, the advantages of top manufacturers are indeed quite obvious. According to Frost Sullivan’s statistics, GoPro、 The top five companies, Insta360, DJI, Shenzhen Senna, and sjcam, collectively hold approximately 74% of the market share.
The competition among top manufacturers is equally fierce, and even the flames of war have spread beyond sports cameras.
Behind the trial of new business by robotic vacuum cleaners is the anxiety of weak growth in their existing business. According to Ove Cloud Network, due to severe product homogenization and gradual saturation of the first and second tier city markets, as well as slow progress in expanding into lower tier markets, sales of robotic vacuum cleaners began to decline after experiencing high-speed growth from 2018 to 2020. Although there was some recovery in 2024 due to national subsidy measures, the overall growth rate is still significantly lower than before.
On the one hand, domestic top sweeping robot manufacturers are actively going global, while on the other hand, they are eager to open up a second curve. In addition to cleaning appliances such as vacuum cleaners and floor scrubbers, Ecovacs has launched window cleaning robots and air purifiers, Stone Technology has tried a more traditional category of washing machines, while Zhumi has started selling hair dryers, vacuum cleaners, water purifiers, and lawn mowers, and even rumors of a car manufacturing team.
But in the face of a completely unfamiliar industry, it is still unknown whether sweeping machine manufacturers can recreate their glory.
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