GoPro stock got hammered again today after chip supplier Ambarella released weak third quarter guidance on Wednesday. Shares of GoPro fell as much as 5.46% to $39.03 per share during regular trading hours on Thursday.
Ambarella shares also continued tumbling today, falling as much as 8.51% to $75.01 per share in spite of the earnings and sales beats—all because of weak guidance in only the action camera segment.
Barclays sees something good for GoPro
Most analysts echoed the negative sentiment investors have expressed in their reports on GoPro this week. However, Barclays analysts Joseph Wolf and Brian Finneran accentuated the positive in Ambarella’s earnings report.
Because of Ambarella management’s commentary about the action camera market in the third quarter, most are not expecting another new camera from GoPro this year. While most analysts appear to see the lack of another release this year as negative, the Barclays team thinks it’s a positive because shifting the release of new cameras from the holiday season closer to the beginning of the year should ease the seasonality GoPro had before.
GoPro shifts camera release timing
Historically, the action camera maker has released new models during the fourth quarter around the holiday shopping season. However, this year marked a pronounced shift as the new HERO4 cameras came out over the summer.
In the past, GoPro recorded 40% of its annual sales during the December quarter, making the quarter extremely seasonally weighted for the company. By shifting the annual new camera release earlier in the year, the Barclays team thinks the company’s sales should become a bit more even throughout the year.
Will there be another GoPro camera this year?
Their view that a shift in the timing of camera releases is a good thing isn’t the only way they differ from most other analysts. Unlike the rest of Wall Street, they did not take Ambarella’s comments about a slow third and fourth quarter for the action camera market as meaning that GoPro will not release another new camera yet this year.
They note that the company has been “very good historically about not tipping its hand with regard to new product launches.” As a result, they’re not ruling out a fourth quarter release, unlike pretty much everyone else on Wall Street.
Wolf and Finneran expect GoPro’s product focus to start including software and editing tools for videos. They noted that the company released a new editing tool for trimming and sharing video clips on Aug. 31 and say that tool is a good example of what they expect going forward.
The Barclays team doesn’t think the selloff in GoPro shares is warranted from a fundamental standpoint, and they think the camera maker is still doing well in the current quarter. They continue to rate GoPro at Overweight with a price target of $71 per share.
Raymond James slashes price target for GoPro
Raymond James analyst Tavis McCourt also rates GoPro at the equivalent of a Buy rating (Outperform, in his case), but he slashed his price target for the company from $71 down to $50 per share following Ambarella’s earnings report. He echoed most of the rest of Wall Street in saying that the company probably won’t release any more products this year—unless of course it has a product from a different vendor coming, but that would be the first time GoPro did that.
McCourt doesn’t think demand for GoPro’s cameras is collapsing, although he notes that the company’s stock has been falling because investors are worrying about slowing sales. However, he notes that data from Google Trends suggests that global sell-through of the company’s cameras is probably up year over year.
