DJI has long ruled the Japanese video camera market with the Osmo Pocket 3, but the sales of the Osmo Pocket 4 have taken it to a whole new level of dominance.
The latest sales figures are in from Japan, and they show that DJI has demolished the opposition. The DJI Osmo Pocket 4 shipped on April 22 and, in just nine days of sales, it captured 21.5% of the entire Japanese video camera market by unit volume, according to BCN Rankings. This isn't everything sold in Japan ever, but as a dataset compiled from actual point-of-sale records across 2400 consumer electronics stores and online retailers nationwide, it is widely held to be a good indicator of what's going on.
DJI dominates to an impressive degree. The Osmo Pocket 3, still on sale alongside its successor, came in at number two. In fact, four of the top five slots in the April rankings were DJI products, with Insta360's GO Ultra the only non-DJI camera managing to break into the stats at number five.
It's worth putting that in context. The Osmo Pocket 3 had held the top sales spot in Japan for 29 consecutive months after its October 2023 launch. That's an extraordinary run for any consumer electronics product, let alone one in a category that's been under sustained pressure from smartphones for the better part of a decade.
For DJI as a whole, the Pocket 4's launch pushed the company's market share in the Japanese video camera category to a record 72.5%. The broader market responded to the launch too: April video camera unit sales were up 158.1% year on year, with revenue up 135.2%.
The BCN+R analysis makes an interesting point. Japanese camera manufacturers went upmarket as smartphone cameras improved, concentrating resources on high-end mirrorless systems aimed at a small enthusiast and professional base. DJI and Insta360 went the other way, building compact, stabilised, genuinely pocketable cameras that do things smartphones can't at prices that don't require a professional justification. Sales data alone suggests that was the right call.
One other point worth mentioning is that the amount of money DJI will lose in the future by not being able to service the US market in the same way is substantial. According to the company's own figures, that includes 14 existing products with voided FCC authorizations (inc. five drones), 25 planned 2026 launches blocked from the US market, and a projected $1.56 billion loss this calendar year. Ouch.