Who is Buying GoPro? Good News & Bad News!

Added: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]Breaking news. GoPros issued a warning to investors that they're facing bankruptcy or buyout. Almost certainly in my opinion. I'm going to tell you what's happening, what the consumer needs to know, as well as some exciting potential things in their future like potentially being bought out by Apple, Garmin, DJI, or maybe falling into the same pit as Kodak. I'll tell you all about it. But first, a quick warning to consumers. I officially do not recommend anybody buy a GoPro camera now, new or used, because I'm really concerned about their ability to uh update and maintain the software, which you really need for a lot of important features of the camera. I'm going to thank our sponsor, Squarespace. Squarespace makes amazing websites possible. Just go to squarespace.com/tonony.

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[00:01:33]You're trying to reduce your expenditures so your balance sheet looks a little bit better and it's a little bit more attractive. This is a common tactic. So why did GoPro issue this huge scary warning to their investors that they might have to go bankrupt? Well, they have $24.5 million in non-cancellable commitments, and if they default, they would immediately have to pay back $und00 million in debt. They're not making enough money to pay off their existing debts. And if they can't keep up, debtors come in and basically take the company for everything that it's worth. So, they're beginning to look for some better alternative, hopefully just buying it out so shareholders get some amount of value and not total bankruptcy. Now, on a side note, you'll notice GoPro stock actually up a little bit today. That doesn't mean that GoPro suddenly has more value, though it might because the possibility of an investor coming in and buying it up for more than going price means it could actually make a little bit of money. But also, you tend to get day traders in in these situations. The core problem here is that demand for GoPro cameras has dropped by about a third in the last 2 years. Why is all this happening?

[00:02:42]Nobody's buying GoPro cameras.

[00:02:44]Smartphones have mostly displaced the action camera, especially now that they're they're waterproof, and you have it already, and they have amazing stabilization systems built into it. But also, we have pressure from Chinese companies like DJI and Insta 360, who are making tiny, less expensive, and in my opinion, generally better action cameras. GoPro is sort of a lastditch effort. Did release a couple of new cameras recently, or at least they announced it, including an interchangeable lens camera that nobody can really buy yet. this was just a lastditch effort to try to make themsel look attractive and viable to a potential partner. Now, in the official statement, they're saying this is AI's fault, that the increase of AI power is buying up all the the flash memory, and that's increasing the cost of their cameras. The the truth is, according to my math, it could be $10 to $20 per camera. That doesn't sound like a lot, but given the fairly low price point of their camera and the really, really lean margins, that's enough that it could make their entire business just unworkable. But I still totally believe that it's just a copout to blame AI and not take personal responsibility for mismanaging the company. What would it take to buy GoPro? You you would need about $400 million, which is more than I have, but maybe some of y'all want to like chip in and we could just buy it.

[00:04:00]Right now they have about a $213 million market capitalization. They have about $100 million in debt that you would have to buy off and then you have to throw some to the shareholders and some kind of premium. Now let's talk about who can buy them. But first, who can't buy them?

[00:04:14]It's not going to be DJI. DJI bought Hasselblad. Another Chinese firm is looking to buy Leica. That can happen because they're European companies and the laws are a little bit different.

[00:04:23]GoPro being an American company has American regulations and there's no way American regulations are going to allow DJI, a company that is currently banned from selling new products in the United States. They're not going to be able to buy GoPro. My dream, even though I think it's unlikely, is that Apple would buy GoPro. There are a lot of synergies here. GoPro has patents for stabilization technologies that Apple could really benefit from, especially if they continue to try to push this Apple Vision Pro thing, which needs to capture in 3D, and everything has to be extremely stable for 3D. Now, Apple and their iPhone has really good software and hardware stabilization technologies, but GoPro really has the best in the world patents. So, by acquiring GoPro, they'd get those patents as well as a bunch of engineers that they might be able to repurpose elsewhere. I also have this dream that at some point Apple will make a dedicated camera that connects as seamlessly to your phone as your AirPods or your CarPlay or your Apple TV do.

[00:05:25]See, Apple doesn't let just any device connect so seamlessly to their phones.

[00:05:30]they sort of reserve some ultra wideband style protocols and handshaking things that make you stay in the Apple infrastructure and like okay I don't love that idea but please just give me a camera that can integrate into that so a camera can be more of an extension to a phone if they were to buy a camera company like GoPro and it could integrate so seamlessly into your phone like think of all the different possibilities for having a separate device or even maybe their new interchangeable lens camera that integrate as easily as your AirPods do.

[00:06:06]That's my dream. But I think a more likely buyer is Garmin. They make sort of adventure stuff right now. Like they used to just make little GPS things to help you from being lost and dead in the woods and they still make that kind of thing. I have a few Garmin devices cuz I'm kind of an avid hiker. They have wearables that will help you get from here to there. They have things that monitor your heart rate for cyclists and airplane pilots. And they actually tried to launch action cameras competing directly against GoPro a few years back, their Verb line, and they failed even though they offered great integration with their other products and they could overlay a map of your path on the video or your heart rate or your elevation, things that are actually like pretty cool and compelling in a video. couldn't beat GoPro because of GoPro's brand equity. Well, if you can't beat them, buy them. And Garmin is sitting on a huge pile of cash. They could buy GoPro for basically like one quarter's worth of their profit. And I think there's a lot of synergies there. And I personally would love to see GoPro, basically the last American camera company, I would love to see it stay an American camera company. What I actually think is the most likely outcome from this is a private equity firm comes and buys up whatever is left of GoPro. One obvious option is ABG, the authentic brands group. They have things like Quicksilver and Reebok, and they don't actually do any development of the products, but they do maintain the brand a little bit.

[00:07:37]A company like ABG would just basically sell the GoPro brand name to anybody who wanted to use it. We've seen Kodak go through this. like they had some awful like Bitcoin generating device that they just painted that Kodak orange yellow color. They have the Kodak Charmera uh scammer piece of some third-party company just approaches the brand and says like, "Hey, sell us your brand name. We'll slap the Kodak sticker on there and we can charge 20% more and we'll give you some cut of that." And basically, this is how GoPro started.

[00:08:12]Nick Woodman literally just bought some cheap Chinese cameras and slapped the American GoPro brand on them. So, it is kind of a fitting end to the company, but it would be nice to see the brand developed in in some way. Another obvious option is the Feralin Group management that already holds a bunch of GoPros debt. They could just buy up the remaining part of it and just sell off the patents and just sell it for parts and maybe they can make those numbers work. Now, you might be asking, "What about poor old Nick Woodman with his rags to rich's story growing up a poor kid sleeping in his VW van and pulling up to beaches and selling these cameras to surfers directly. That story is BS.

[00:08:57]He just grew up like a super rich kid.

[00:09:00]It's not rags to riches. It's more like multi-millionaire private school kid to billionaire. But regardless, Nick is going to be okay. He is worth at a minimum hundreds of millions of dollars, but I strongly suspect it's well over a billion dollars because when GoPro went IPO, he took out a massive amount of equity from the company. He used legal but shady charity schemes in United States tax law to keep from paying that back to the public. and uh he's in invested it. He has so much that he could definitely just save GoPro himself and take it private. But why would he do that? That would be an actually a terrible, terrible investment for him, especially cuz he has proven that he can't keep the company running.

[00:09:53]So, I suspect no such thing will happen.

[00:09:55]I suspect he'll find some outside buyer and whoever that buyer is will have no interest in Nick Woodman. If it's somebody like Apple or Garmin, they will probably get him to sign a contract for like 12 or 18 months to to help with the transition. If it's one of these private equity companies, he'll just be out day one while they sell the rest of it for parts. In the comments down below, let me know what you think. Is there another interesting path for insolvent GoPro?

[00:10:23]What do you think will happen? Make your predictions and put it in writing because predicting the future is hard.

[00:10:28]So, don't bust my balls if I'm wrong about this. Thank you to my sponsor, Squarespace. If you need any sort of web presence, start at squarespace.com/tonony.

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