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?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by FatPhil on Tuesday January 09 2018, @12:42PM (1 child)
I really like my current pie, therefore getting new pies is good. That's the limit to their logic.
They should have produced cheaper cameras, and pushed them into more drones, effectively selling rights to use the brand name, in the same way that Shimano did with derailleurs on bikes decades ago.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Tuesday January 09 2018, @08:50PM
So true. There are so many players entering the drone space that the profit margins must be minimal. GoPro already has a strong name in the action camera space and they can maintain premiums for their products. Perhaps they will migrate to this business model in the future.