The public market’s continual pounding has bruised and battered GoPro. Over the past 12 months, the action camera makers stock has fallen over 70%, slashing billions of dollars in market capitalization and leaving investors and customers wondering if the company, based in San Mateo, California, whose cameras defined a completely separate electronics category, was just a one-off wonder.
On Monday, Nicholas Woodman the CEO at GoPro attempted to reverse that tide by announcing the company made two strategic acquisitions that address one of its products biggest problems – video editing.
The founder of GoPro said his company had paid out $105 million in stock and cash to acquire two businesses behind Splice and Replay, a pair of apps used for video editing that allow the user to cut as well as publish footage on mobile phones.
While the action camera maker has been selling cameras to users that can in turn look like a hero or pro athlete, the reality has hit that users find it quite arduous to upload as well as sift through hours of scuba diving or skiing footage in order to but a video of quality work together.
The GoPro CEO has acknowledged the same, calling the editing a big inconvenience during the fourth quarter of the company’s earnings call.
Replay was designed by Stupeflix a Paris based company. It allows its users to select photos and clips and combine them automatically into a full video with effects, transitions and background music.
Splice was designed by Vemory, based in Austin, and provides a manual editing tool for video. Woodman has declined to say the amount paid by GoPro for each of them and remained somewhat cagey about how they would begin to be integrated into the company’s current offerings of software.
Both teams are to join GoPro and to remain in their own cities, although Woodman did not say the number of people that would be joining the company.
The website of Stupeflix currently has a display that lists 26 employees, but the number of Vemory employees is not known.
GoPro announced in February it would cut 7% of its entire workforce, after poor sales during the holiday season due in large part to the unsuccessful cube camera, the Hero4 Session.
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