How GoPro lost its way

GoPro’s announcement that it plans to cut 23% of its workforce this week didn’t come as a complete shock to anyone who’s been following the wearable camera maker over the past few years.

Once a leader in the action camera market, the company has seen its stock fall from highs of more than $93 in 2014 to just 80 cents today. The $10 billion valuation it once boasted is a distant memory. (GoPro’s current market cap is just under $122 million.) Now it’s betting on an ongoing turnaround plan to stabilize the business.

Part of that plan involves becoming an even leaner operation. GoPro will lay off 145 of its 631 employees starting in the second fiscal quarter. That will result in charges of between $11.5 million and $15 million. Prior to this week’s cuts, the company said it had reduced its costs by 26% from the previous year.

That hasn’t been enough to restore profitability. While the company had targeted a return to the black by the end of 2025, it instead posted a $9.1 million loss in the fourth quarter.

A long history of troubles

GoPro faces plenty of challenges today. Tariffs have slowed its turnaround, rising memory costs are eating into margins, and supply issues have weighed on the bottom line. But many of its problems predate those pressures.

At the height of the company’s popularity in 2014 and 2015, founder and CEO Nicholas Woodman pushed to expand beyond cameras, launching both a media division and a drone unit meant to compete with DJI. The move drove a surge in head count, which peaked at 1,600 employees, and in R&D spending, which shot as high as $358.9 million in 2016, more than double what it had been just two years earlier.

Neither bet paid off. The media division shut down in 2016, and the drone was pulled from the market after experiencing battery failures mid-flight.

In 2014 Woodman was the highest-paid CEO in the U.S., receiving a stock package worth $285 million. By 2018 that salary had been reduced to $1. (He voluntarily waived the remainder of his then-$850,000 annual salary in March 2025.)

As GoPro ventured further from its core product, the competition grew, not just from drone makers but from smartphones, which became more rugged and capable of shooting 4K video without the need for a separate device. Many of those companies also built easy-to-use editing tools, an area GoPro chose not to prioritize, pushing away another segment of its user base.

GoPro has tried to right the ship with layoffs before. In 2024, it cut 139 jobs, about 15% of its workforce. Two years earlier, it cut 270 roles. In the 14 months before that, it reduced head count twice more by 100-plus employees each time. None of those cuts returned the company to profitability.

Yet despite its profitability issues, GoPro has continued to produce new generations of its cameras—and the next will be introduced later this month at the NAB Show. Those, the company says, will be powered by a new GP3 processor that will be “more professionally focused than ever before,” with larger sensors and expanded features.

GoPro is no stranger to professional users, but whether that consumer segment will be enough to turn things around remains unclear. The clock is ticking. In late March, Nasdaq notified GoPro that its stock was at risk of being delisted for failing to meet minimum bid price requirements.

If shares don’t stay above $1 for at least 10 consecutive days before late September, they will no longer be allowed to trade on the Nasdaq Global Select Market.

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