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| Yahoo Finance UK/AP Photo/Seth Wenig - Nick Woodman holds a GoPro camera in his mouth as he celebrates his company's IPO at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, June 26, 2014 |
From catching waves in Hawaii, base jumping in Utah or skiing the Austrian Alps, the must-have gadget for today’s adrenaline junkies is a GoPro.
Billed as the world's most versatile camera, a GoPro allows extreme sports enthusiast to capture their every move while social media users live vicariously through the daredevil stuntmen.
The tiny camera has made its founder Nicholas Woodman a billionaire – and he’s yet to turn 40. An adrenaline junkie himself, Woodman is worth around $2.9bn (£1.9bn) according to Forbes.
For the uninitiated, a GoPro is a small but high quality video camera that can be worn by the user in several different ways or attached to sporting equipment such as mountain bikes, skis and surfboards. The camera can shoot high quality video footage or still photographs at predefined intervals.
October 2012 saw skydiver Felix Baumgartner use a GoPro to record the world’s highest sky-dive, and the cameras are routinely used by nature channels such as National Geographic and The Discovery Channel.
But it’s the fact that GoPro has a price point that makes the cameras accessible to the mainstream which is largely responsible for the gadget’s success – you can pick up a GoPro Hero for under £100, although more complex models cost more.
GoPro wasn’t Woodman’s first business venture. He set up Funbug in 1999 as a gaming and marketing platform that gave users the chance to win cash prizes. Investors piled $3.9m (£2.56m) into the venture during the dot-com frenzy. The subsequent bubble bursting saw the company fail and was one of the era’s biggest disaster stories.
To rejuvenate, 2001 saw Woodman take a five-month trip to Indonesia and Australia and this is when the idea for the GoPro took hold. A keen surfer, Woodman longed for a camera which he could strap to his wrist to record barrels, backhands and hang-tens.
GoPro started life as a strap to attach existing cameras to surfers’ wrists with the first model made out of surfboard leashes and rubber bands. Woodman later honed his idea and decided to build the wrist strap, camera and device casing all in one package.
The first prototype was built using his mum’s sewing machine and a drill, with the first 35mm still camera debuting at San Diego's Action Sports Retailer trade show in 2004. Initially sold in surf shops and shopping channel QVC, the GoPro soon caught on among extreme sport enthusiasts.
Some of the company’s starting capital came from selling belts made of shells and beads, which Woodman and his then girlfriend Jill (now his wife) bought in Indonesia. The couple brought 600 belts back to the US and sold them at a $10,000 (£6,575) profit. Woodman invested a total of $30,000 (£19,725) in the project under the company name of Woodman Labs.
But Woodman’s story isn’t one of rags to riches – he had significant financial support from his family too; his mother invested $35,000 (£23,000) at start-up stage while his father was a prominent Silicon Valley investment banker who later invested $200,000 (£131,500) in the company.
By the end of its first year, GoPro had sold $150,000 (£98,613) worth of cameras with Woodman hiring an old college friend to help him market the product to surf shops and other retailers. Soon it was clear that the video camera would be just as useful on land as well as water and GoPro’s sales increased as it was sold to mountain bikers and skiers.
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| The GoPro Hero 3+ camera [Joe Giddens/PA Archive/Press Association Images] |
By 2006 the camera had moved on from just taking still photographs. Additional video capabilities, and later audio capabilities, saw its popularity grow. 2006 brought $800,000 (£525,934) in revenue, while the following year saw sales quadruple to $3.4 m (£2.24m).
Rounds of venture capitalist funding between 2010 and 2012 followed, the most notable being $200m (£132m) from Foxconn in December 2012. The Chinese electronics manufacturer’s investment boosted the company’s worth to about $2.25bn (£1.48bn) and propelled Woodman, who still owns a large chunk of the company, into Forbes’ billionaires list.
In 2012 the company sold 2.3 million cameras and grossed $521m (£343m). By now it had become the highest-grossing digital imaging brand at US retailer Best Buy, overtaking Sony for the first time.
GoPro was valued at almost $3bn (£1.97bn) when it floated in June 2014. Shares were initially sold at $24 (£16) with double-digit percentage gains each day for several days after the initial public offering (IPO).
Despite considerable venture capitalist investment, a large part of GoPro is still owned by Woodman and his family. Both his sisters and both his parents are multi-millionaires due to their respective shareholdings in the company.
Today users can take professional quality HD video and save their exploits to a memory card or wirelessly transfer them to a GoPro app on a smartphone or tablet. GoPro maintains an impressive 94% share of the action-camera market, although this could come under threat from competitors such as Garmin’s Virb.
But for now GoPro’s riding high – on waves, mountains and in the stock market where shares are worth around $48 (£32), twice its IPO price.
Source: Yahoo! News Philippines
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