GoPro stock plummets 90% in less than a 1.5 years

[Mokara]

16 hours ago, Damphousse said:

Really?  Or maybe they are a dominant company in a limited low margin sector.  Even in really crappy industries there are dominant players.  Being dominant doesn't mean automatic profit.

 

It is not that limited of a market. The area of personal surveillance/security/logging is a going to be a growth area in the imaging market over the next decade. You are going to find small imagers in everything.

The problems they face are largely due to management and the company's lack of secondary activities to leverage technology development (such as processors). If one of the leading camera companies could somehow get GoPro's market share, they would make a profit without question. GoPro's problems are of their own making, it is not due to the industry sector itself.

[IronFilm]

7 hours ago, Mokara said:

It is not that limited of a market. The area of personal surveillance/security/logging is a going to be a growth area in the imaging market over the next decade. You are going to find small imagers in everything.

Car cameras is a massive market, could have been a reasonable pivot/sideline for GoPro to have approached that niche as well. Lots of missed opportunities have happened for GoPro unfortunately. 

[kye]

2 hours ago, IronFilm said:

Car cameras is a massive market, could have been a reasonable pivot/sideline for GoPro to have approached that niche as well. Lots of missed opportunities have happened for GoPro unfortunately. 

All companies must use the profit from their existing sales to invest in the next product or service that will take over from their existing offerings, otherwise they'll lose market share and eventually fail.  

This happens across all industries, but at different speeds.  Slow change tends to make people say "when I got my first job it was different then", moderate change is "I worked as a X, but then there was less demand and so I re-trained as a Y", and fast change is when you are competing in an industry where multiple people have an annual product release cycle but products take longer than a year to design.  This is the modern electronics market.  Super fast change is in fashion or software where what is hot today is worth very little in months or weeks time.  Product cycles are so short in fashion that it's now called Disposable Fashion.

https://www.npr.org/2016/04/08/473513620/what-happens-when-fashion-becomes-fast-disposable-and-cheap

""It used to be four seasons in a year; now it may be up to 11 or 15 or more," says Tasha Lewis, a professor at Cornell University's Department of Fiber Science and Apparel Design."

GoPro is a one-trick pony, as demonstrated by the relatively poor performance of their drone and 360 camera shows, their only non-action-camera products.