GoPro’s Karma Drone Is Back

After a pretty rotten holiday quarter, action camera maker GoPro Inc.is now staking its hopes for survival on making its cameras work better with phones, positioning itself for a potential bailout from a smartphone maker like Apple Inc. The shares fell as much as 12 percent. For the full year, GoPro reported revenue of $1.19 billion, down 26.8 percent from $1.62 billion in 2015. That’s under what analysts expected. A year ago in 2016 they launched the GoPro Karma which was the company’s first drone but they had to recall all the drones just after few weeks of the launch due to some issues with the Karma.

The past several months have been especially hard on GoPro. However, if users would take a closer look, they would notice that GoPro redesigned the battery latch of the Karma, which the company claims is a simple but effective fix to the battery issues that led to the drone falling out of the sky. The Karma drone can fly with the new Hero 5 Black, Hero 5 Session, and Hero 4 cameras. GoPro also told its customers that shipments will initially be limited, but the company expects “production to ramp quickly”.

The recall isn’t the only setback that GoPro had to face with the Karma drone. Ameriprise Financial Inc. now owns 831,346 shares of the company’s stock worth $13,867,000 after buying an additional 789,138 shares in the last quarter. The firm is ahead its 52-week low of 23.77% and going down from its 52-week high price of -40.21%. Year to Date performance value (YTD perf) value is 21.35%. Earnings, adjusted for pretax expenses and restructuring costs, were 29 cents per share.The results surpassed Wall Street expectations.

The latest quarter included $102 million for a full valuation allowance on US deferred tax assets and almost $37 million for restructuring costs, GoPro said. GoPro, Inc.is headquartered in San Mateo, California. It’s pared back an ambitious strategy of building a media company around its action-packed GoPro videos online. Dougherty & Co cut shares of GoPro from a neutral rating to a sell rating and set a $6.00 price target for the company.in a research report on Wednesday, November 9th. There have also been some management shake-ups, including the departure of Tony Bates, who joined GoPro as President in 2014. Extremely few consumer technology companies have the kind of retail presence that GoPro has and this might work in favor of the company.

Analysts on average were expecting $574.5 million, having lowered their estimate by almost 14 percent since November 3, when GoPro gave a revenue forecast of $600 million to $650 million for the quarter.