Even GoPro is pivoting to defense

Which brings us to GoPro.

The action camera company has survived a lot over the years. For a while during the 2010s, the term “GoPro killer” was almost as common as “Tesla killer” or “iPhone killer,” with people claiming everything from a TomTom action camera to Google’s Clips (remember that?) would dethrone the California company that invented the category.

Survival does not necessarily mean success, though, and GoPro has struggled of late. Sales are down, losses are up, and its stock price essentially flatlined at about $1 two years ago. So, surprise, last month GoPro announced a plan to “explore defense and aerospace market opportunities.”

It makes a certain amount of sense for a company that combines top-tier image quality with enough durability to withstand a motorcycle crash, or a fall from space. And the pivot was enough to nearly double the company’s stock price for a few days. But that, too, has fallen back to Earth. It seems the “pivot to defense” idea is not as bulletproof as GoPro’s cameras, after all.

You can maybe guess where this is going. On Thursday, GoPro announced it hired investment bank Houlihan Lokey to help evaluate a “potential sale and other strategic alternatives.” The company’s board of directors said it recently received “several unsolicited inbound strategic inquiries from parties across various sectors including defense, consumer and financial,” which is a lot of words to effectively say: “Uh-oh.”

It’s not the first time GoPro has considered a sale; founder and CEO Nick Woodman it was briefly on the table back in 2018.

But things are certainly now more dire for the company. Not only are its financials deteriorating, the company announced last month that it’s laying off a quarter of its workforce, which has already shrunk to a little more than 600 workers after once employing as many as 1,500.

GoPro was a tech darling 15 years ago. But like so many of us, it now finds itself navigating a more volatile world. It’s no surprise that a massively ballooning Pentagon budget looks like a viable path through the churn.