My blog article about the full stock review was deleted so I just wanted to point out with answers to some of the comments below for better context:
Technical Analysis:
Honestly, I actually didn't have in mind to make a full technical analysis as I just wanted to share my research about the company as a long term investment opportunity. According to some comments, the graph has bearish patterns. Might be. This was also not financial advice to enter a position right away but rather to talk about an idea and maybe to place GoPro on your watchlist as a company with a potentially great future ahead.
A company that was once focused on no cheap physical products that were able to become profitable while an on-going global pandemic and no sports events or traveling in 2020. That means something about a lot of lessons learned and great management decisions.
The evolvement of the product:
What GoPro did with 2020's camera model, the new GoPro Hero 9, is honestly brilliant. For the first time, they presented the ability to switch lenses, and the camera is built in a way that it can quickly mount, as they call it, 'Mods'. That means lighting, an extra monitor, a microphone, and a tripod.
GoPro creates a state of the art cameras. The cameras are not cheap and not easily breakable. The average consumer will ask himself twice if they should upgrade to the latest model.
With that fact in mind, even if a GoPro consumer is not buying a new camera, they can easily consider buying a new lens or other Mods. That's on top of the monthly subscription model for the cloud service.
The new sales opportunities introduced by the new line of cameras combined with the digital subscription make GoPro's future revenue stream much more robust than in past years.
"GoPro is a hardware company with big debt":
GoPro develops high-action, high-impact cameras. A bit over a year ago, GoPro started to focus on cloud tech with a subscription-based business model heavily.
In Q4's Earnings Report, GoPro announced how they grew to 761,000 subscribers at the end of 2020, a 145% increase compared to the end of 2019. Impressive growth here as well. as mentioned above, they marked a goal to reach 2M subs by end of 2021.
For a company that was primarily relying on yearly physical product sales, shifting the focus to a monthly subscription fee for digital experiences will now be one of the leading revenue streams, if not the main one.
You might say that to join the GoPro community, you need to buy a GoPro camera. As stated above, GoPro is a tech company. They do not just make excellent cameras. They create software too. Their video editing app "Quik" has around 9M monthly active users. And they improved the main GoPro app with a new feature called "Mural", which helps GoPro camera users share their own stories and exciting moments with the rest of the community more easily.
In 2021 though, GoPro will introduce new features and support in their apps to non-GoPro users. That means that other action cameras or your mobile smartphone camera will be able to utilize these features. That increases the Total Addressable Market (TAM) of GoPro, which can potentially result in more sales and new subscribers.