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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday January 09 2018, @09:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the see-ya dept.

Action camera make GoPro has not benefited from entering the drone business. In fact, the company is reeling from it:

GoPro hoped its Karma drone would drive growth. Instead, the action camera maker confirmed it's ending Karma production and will cut nearly 300 jobs, or more than 20% of its global workforce.

The company may also be putting itself up for sale: According to CNBC, the company has hired JP Morgan Chase to seek a potential sale. "If there are opportunities for us to unite with a bigger parent company to scale GoPro even bigger, that is something that we would look at," GoPro CEO Nick Woodman told CNBC earlier Monday.

Karma had a disastrous launch in 2016. Only a few weeks after its release, GoPro issued a mass recall of 2,500 units because faulty engineering caused the drones to lose power mid-flight and drop out of the sky.

The drone remained the second most popular of its price class after the recall, GoPro said, but an "extremely competitive aerial market," as well as a "hostile regulatory environment" in Europe and the US made the product's future "untenable."

Also at The Mercury News and Ars Technica.

Related: Ask Soylent: Best Long Range, Camera Drone for under $1K?


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by radu on Tuesday January 09 2018, @10:16AM

    by radu (1919) on Tuesday January 09 2018, @10:16AM (#619941)

    Hostile regulations like... only allowed to fly if doesn't

    lose power mid-flight and drop out of the sky

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