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To be completely honest, I had never heard of GoPro (NASDAQ:GPRO) before today. That’s probably because very few of us who were around when the Beatles took America by storm know anything about GoPro. For SEO purposes, I need to say something about the GoPro share price early in this post. There. I did it. Now I need to take another sentence to explain to Mr. Chambers that I will, eventually, get to the day’s news about GoPro. But first, I want to be sure that all our readers have a thumbnail sketch of this fascinating company.
CEO Nicholas Woodman describes his company this way:
Think it. See it. Do it.
We dream. We have passionate ideas about what’s possible in this world. Our passions lead us to create experiences and realities that expand our world and inspire those around us.
GoPro helps people capture and share their lives’ most meaningful experiences with others—to celebrate them together. Like how a day on the mountain with friends is more meaningful than one spent alone, the sharing of our collective experiences makes our lives more fun.
The world’s most versatile cameras are what we make.
Enabling you to share your life through incredible photos and videos is what we do.
My introduction to GoPro came this morning, watching a video of the crew of the International Space Station experimenting with GoPro and water. (In case you are wondering, I had heard of water before.) Here’s a copy of that video from Yahoo News.
Although I was amazed, I did not expect to come across GoPro again, especially within the same hour. But there it was, as bold as can be on my computer screen as I was surfing the day’s financial news. This morning, just six days after releasing its very first quarterly earnings report as a public company – That’s right. It’s IPO took place on 26 June – the company filed an S-1, signalling its intention to sell up to $800 million in additional shares.
I’m glad that I did not catch that information as early in the day as I usually do, because the initial investor response today was not positive, and I would probably have reported it that way. Investors just assumed that something must be wrong and that GoPro was financially distressed. The stock opened this morning at 75.80, already down 4.4% from Friday’s close, before it plunged to 73.00 shortly after 10:00 a.m. Then, in a flurry of increased trading, the stock rose to 78.10 about an hour and a half later. As of 3:51 p.m. EST, the shares have decline gradually over the rest of the day to 75.39, pretty close to where they opened.
My personal opinion is that investors are afraid of innovative tech companies in general. The theory is that technology is changing so rapidly that what’s here today will be gone tomorrow. But that is precisely why I shared Nicholas Woodman’s vision of his company earlier. There is something different about GoPro. In a video on the company website, Woodman explains that the company is not what the initial vision was, but that they have continually reset their objectives by re-imagining what is possible. That’s about as foreign to traditional terms like “restructuring” and “rethinking” as Chinese is to me.
GoPro went public on 26 June at 28.65 and closed that day at 31.34. Although its 52-week high is 98.47, its IPO price is still its 52-week low and its shares are trading at more than double its opening day. That seems like the beginning of a good story (just ask Mark Zuckerberg), expecially when combined with a quarterly report that featured a 46% increase in quarterly revenue year-on-year and a net income of $14.6 million that eclipse a $1.1 million loss in the same quarter in 2013.
There is a lot more to this story that can be told in the days to come. GoPro is worth watching.
