GoPro's Market Value Plunged from 74 Billion to 1.9 Billion Before a Fire Sale

Author | Pencil News, Songge

Editor | Pencil News, Huang Xiaogui

Cover image | Chart by Pencil News

GoPro, the pioneer of action cameras, is selling itself on the cheap.

On September 1, GoPro announced a merger agreement with optics and photonics company Starman Optical. GoPro shareholders will receive a total of $285 million in cash (about RMB 1.9 billion) and retain roughly 10% of the combined company.

When it went public in 2014, GoPro's market value peaked at $11 billion (about RMB 74 billion); it has lost 97% of that over the past 12 years.

How did a company that once defined an entire category end up here?

- 01 - Market value down 97%

The acquirer is a U.S. optics company called Starman Optical, offering $285 million in cash, or $1.14 per share. Once the deal closes, Starman will hold 90%, existing shareholders will retain 10%, and GoPro's $92 million of debt will be repaid along the way.

What does $1.14 per share mean? When GoPro first went public in 2014, the stock peaked at $98 and its market value topped $11 billion. In 12 years, it has fallen 97%.

Founder Nick Woodman was dubbed by the media as "the next Steve Jobs of hardware." Skiing, surfing, skydiving, extreme sports — all the coolest first-person videos were shot with GoPro.

In 2015, GoPro's revenue peaked at $1.62 billion, with a global market share of more than 75%. That year, it seemed unstoppable.

But after the peak came a steady decline.

In 2016, revenue plunged to $1.185 billion, with a full-year loss of $419 million. It never recovered. Revenue fell year after year: $1.16 billion in 2021, $1.09 billion in 2022, $1 billion in 2023, $800 million in 2024, and just $652 million in 2025. In five years, it was nearly cut in half.

This year has been worse. Second-quarter revenue fell another 31% to just $105 million, while net losses widened to $51 million. Gross margin collapsed from 32% to 4.3% — meaning the company barely makes any money on each camera sold.

The final straw was, of all things, rising memory prices. As AI models scrambled for HBM capacity, memory chipmakers shifted production toward data centers, sending consumer memory prices soaring. A small consumer electronics company like GoPro had no bargaining power and was simply crushed by costs.

In June, GoPro made the rare admission in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that there were "substantial doubts" about its "ability to continue as a going concern." Auditor PwC was even more blunt: without fresh funding or a buyer, the company could face bankruptcy liquidation.

Founder Woodman put up $20 million of his own money to save the company — a drop in the bucket. By the end of August, the share price had fallen to $0.60, just half a step away from Nasdaq's $1 delisting threshold.

When Starman Optical stepped in this time, GoPro's share price surged more than 40% on September 1. Woodman and the old shareholders ought to be down on their knees in gratitude.

- 02 - How GoPro Fell Apart

Many say GoPro was beaten by China's DJI and Insta360.

In the global action camera market, GoPro still held 84% in 2022, but by 2025 that had fallen to just 18%. DJI and Insta360 together captured 79%.

Putao Teng Technology founder Li Yachong comes from a hardware background. He told Qianbidao: "The moat of consumer hardware has never been any single technology. It is three things — innovation, supply chain, and channels — and none of the three can be missing."

GoPro's problem is precisely that it lost these three things, one by one.

The first casualty was the pace of innovation.

After going public, GoPro stopped focusing on cameras and tried to become a "content media company." Copying Red Bull, it poured money into content operations and media businesses, while iteration on its core products slowed. The Hero series slipped into incremental mode, with each generation changing less than the last, leaving consumers increasingly reluctant to upgrade.

Meanwhile, what were Chinese companies doing?

DJI tells consumers: my battery lasts longer, night shots look better, the price is lower, and it connects directly to my microphone.

Insta360 tells consumers: you don't need to know camera moves — capture everything in 360 degrees and frame your shot afterward.

"They are not competing with GoPro over who makes the better action camera; they are using a new category to eat into the action camera market," Li Yachong commented.

The second casualty is supply chain decision-making efficiency.

GoPro has long been a global outsourced manufacturer, with product design and R&D spread across the US, France, China and Romania, and most hardware production outsourced to contract manufacturers in China, Thailand and Vietnam. Lenses, sensors and chips likewise come from the Asian supply chain.

But the decisions are made in the US.

Li Yachong knows this all too well. Building a hardware product of his own this year, he found that supply chain proximity directly determines R&D speed and cost: "Shipping a board from Shenzhen to Zhengzhou takes two days, and expedited delivery costs extra. But if the team is in Shenzhen, you can ask for something in the morning and the supplier delivers it that afternoon."

"Hardware isn't something you get right once and you're done. You have to keep prototyping, revising, testing and remanufacturing. When decisions are made far away, every iteration adds time and money. After twenty cycles, the gap shows."

When Insta360 founder Liu Jingkang spoke with 36Kr back in 2020, he summed up the company's competitive edge in one blunt word: speed.

He is not claiming "the world's fastest R&D." Rather, when problems surface, he tests and iterates faster than rivals, and adjusts faster too.

The third loss is competitiveness in pricing and distribution.

In consumer hardware, it ultimately comes down to who can drive costs lowest and distribute products most widely.

On price, DJI and Insta360, backed by Shenzhen's supply chain, have a natural advantage. DJI's Action 5 Pro is priced 200 yuan lower than Insta360's Ace Pro 2, with heavily overlapping core specs. If Chinese companies are competing this fiercely among themselves, what does GoPro have to fight a price war with?

Li Yachong concluded: "Relying on a single advantage makes it easy for later entrants to overtake you. The real difficulty in consumer hardware is sustaining innovation while also manufacturing at low cost and scale, and getting products into consumers' hands quickly."

- 03 - Who is making money off GoPro's corpse?

GoPro fell, but someone made money off it.

The first to profit is Starman Optical.

Hard as it may be to believe, the company that acquired GoPro was only incorporated in Delaware on August 31, 2026 — the day before the acquisition announcement.

Behind it is Starman Holdings, a New York-based family conglomerate with businesses spanning technology, consumer brands and real estate. The actual operating business under Starman Optical is Starman New Photonics, a joint venture formed in 2024 with a company called New Photonics. It makes optical transceivers — the core components in AI data centers that convert electrical signals into optical signals.

So what did it want with GoPro? Not the cameras — the patents.

After 24 years of making imaging hardware, GoPro holds more than 2,500 U.S. patents covering optics, imaging and image stabilization. Those patents may be worth little in the consumer camera market, but they suddenly become highly valuable in fields such as AI data centers, robotics and defense.

This may be the most surprising twist in the GoPro story: you think you are in the consumer business, only to find that the technology you accumulated really pays off in a completely different market.

$285 million buys a listed company with 2,500 optical patents, plus a Nasdaq listing shell. Slot your own optical module business into it later and it instantly becomes a "US-made optics + AI infrastructure" stock — a several-fold valuation increase is not out of the question.

It also tells a story of "American-made import substitution" — bringing optical component production back from overseas to the US to serve defense and AI infrastructure. What is that story worth in today's US political climate? No one can say for sure.

The second winner is Markiplier, who bought its stock.

This one is a bit dramatic. Markiplier is a YouTube megastar with tens of millions of followers. The day before the acquisition announcement, he was reported to have bought an 8.5% stake in GoPro, making him the largest single shareholder. Once the news broke, the share price jumped 43% that day.

The next day, the acquisition announcement came and the stock rose another 40% or so. In other words, he had barely finished building his position before two limit-up moves hit him in the face. In just two days, he made a fortune.

Whether he really happened to buy it, or knew the news in advance, only he himself knows.

This article does not constitute investment advice.

       Original title : From 74 billion to 1.9 billion, GoPro sold on the cheap