The company has its customers to thank for helping it build that reputation. What separates GoPro from Flip is that all along, GoPro has sold consumers not on the camera, itself, but on something the smartphone can't easily replace: the experience of using the camera. Even as the Flip floundered, however, GoPro, which sold its first camera in 2004, flourished. After all, it was just a few years ago that the Flip Video camera, another gadget that dominated the camcorder market for a time, foundered, rendered obsolete by the proliferation of smartphones with ever-improving cameras. To launch a standalone consumer electronics company that does just one thing, even if it can do that one thing really, really well, is a risky endeavor in the age of the smartphone.Īll of that makes GoPro, which raised $427 million at a valuation of $2.96 billion in its IPO, something of an anomaly. On any given day, our phones can act as a GPS system, a video game console, a fitness tracker, a stereo, a camera, and oh yeah, a telephone, all in one.
There's a good reason we haven't seen any consumer electronics companies go public recently (Skullcandy's $189 million IPO in 2011 is the most recent), and that's because smartphones-and the gargantuan companies that make them-can do and build almost everything and anything. But the San Mateo, California-based company might have just pulled off the greatest stunt of all with the biggest initial public offering of a consumer electronics company in more than 20 years.
Millions of people have used GoPro's wearable cameras to record their every sky-diving, drone-flying, shark-riding adventure.
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