Action Camera Maker GoPro Mauled By Bears After Q4 Earnings
GoPro ( GPRO ) shares faced a fresh wave of selling on Thursday after the action camera maker late Wednesday missed lowered holiday-quarter expectations and delivered shockingly bad guidance for the current quarter and full year. On Wall Street, even analysts who had stuck by the beleaguered consumer electronics firm capitulated with downgrades and price target cuts after GoPro’s earnings report . GoPro stock closed down 8.7% at 9.78 on the stock market today , after touching an all-time low of 9.01 earlier in the session. Dougherty analyst Charles Anderson downgraded GoPro stock to neutral from buy. “We expected bad GoPro forecasts, but what we got was worse than feared,” Anderson said in a report Thursday. “The level of spending is frankly staggering — we now estimate GoPro will spend over half of its revenue in 2016 on operating expenses. Management believes they can spend their way out of this and resuscitate the brand and the products.” Anderson doubts this strategy will succeed. On the company’s earnings conference call with analysts, GoPro management said they don’t believe their problems are related to weakening demand or heightened competition. They said sales will pick up after GoPro improves its marketing and releases easier-to-use software for editing and sharing videos. On the marketing front, the company announced it will air a Super Bowl commercial that will feature its entry-level Session camera. Ever-escalating Super Bowl ads this year reportedly cost about $2.4 million, or higher, for a 30-second spot. GoPro Drops 3 Cameras From Product Lineup The company also is eliminating three cameras from its lineup to simplify its offerings to a good-better-best product family. GoPro’s product offering will consist of the Hero 4 Session ($199.99), Hero 4 Silver ($399.99) and Hero 4 Black ($499.99) cameras. GoPro is ending its Hero, Hero Plus and Hero Plus LCD cameras, which ranged in price from $129.99 to $299.99. GoPro still expects its Karma quadcopter drone to ship in the first half of the year. GoPro also is expected to debut its next-generation camera, the Hero 5, this year. Analyst Anderson expects it will come out in September. GoPro lost 8 cents a share excluding items in Q4, where analysts had expected it to break even. It posted sales of $436.6 million, down 31% year over year and missing Wall Street’s target of $496.1 million. GoPro had pre-announced weak holiday sales on Jan. 13. For the March quarter, GoPro expects sales of $170 million at the midpoint of its guidance, down 53%. Analysts had been modeling $298 million. For the year, GoPro expects sales of $1.425 billion, down 12%. Analysts were looking for $1.61 billion. Sterne Agee CRT analyst Rob Cihra cut his rating on GoPro to neutral from buy and slashed his price target to 10 from 21. GoPro’s decision to increase rather than cut operating expenses in the face of declining camera sales was simply “too much to bear,” Cihra said in a research report Thursday. GoPro’s Q1 will be the roughest for the company this year as it burns off inventory of discontinued camera models, Cihra said. While GoPro is upping its investment in new software to ease the age-old pain of accessing, editing and sharing videos, it likely won’t solve that issue right away, Cihra said. “The manageability of home video has been a hurdle for ages and not likely fixed in a snap,” he said. Pacific Crest Securities analyst Brad Erickson said the action camera market is probably saturated, and GoPro’s moves are unlikely to rekindle demand. He rates GoPro as sector weight and recommended that investors continue to steer clear of the stock. GoPro’s guide down for Q1 and the year was “epic,” Erickson said. GoPro CEO Nick Woodman also announced that the company would no longer provide quarterly guidance, just annual guidance. He said the company is better off when it focuses on long-term objectives and not quarterly targets.