Action camera maker GoPro reported fourth-quarter revenue of $634 million, beating Wall Street’s predictions thanks to strong holiday sales. Here are the key points from Thursday’s earnings release.
What you need to know: GoPro’s $634 million in quarterly revenue improved 75% year-over-year and more than doubled the company’s third-quarter sales of $280 million. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company easily outpaced the expectations of analysts, who predicted revenue of $580 million, according to Thomson Reuters. GoPro closed out 2014 with a 41% increase in annual revenue, to $1.4 billion.
GoPro’s quarterly profits nearly tripled to $122.3 million from $43.7 million during the same period in 2013. The company’s annual profits more than doubled, growing to $128.1 million from $60.6 million a year earlier.
The company also announced that COO Nina Richardson is leaving GoPro at the end of February. The company’s stock dropped more than 15% in after-hours trading following a day in which GoPro shares already improved by nearly 5%.
GoPro’s shares (GPRO) were down nearly 30% over the past three months. The company’s shares were in high demand for months after a successful IPO last June, but began to reverse course in the fall. (The company’s shares are still selling for more than double their $24 IPO price.)
Recently, GoPro’s stock fell dramatically as the market responded to Apple (AAPL) receiving a new patent for a wearable video camera that could potentially rival GoPro’s own products.
The big number: Last month, GoPro CEO Nick Woodman boasted about the company’s uptick in sales during the holiday season, telling CNBC that “it was a GoPro Christmas” for the company as well as for retailers and customers. The launch of a new version of GoPro’s Hero line of wearable sports cameras in September helped make it a strong holiday season.
GoPro shipped 2.4 million cameras in the fourth quarter, which represents an improvement of 68% over the same period in 2013. In fact, the company said shipped more units in this most recent fourth quarter than it did in all of 2012. The company’s 5.2 million shipments for the whole of 2014 marked a 35% jump over the previous year’s shipments.
What you might have missed: GoPro has been touting its strategy to expand beyond just camera sales to a full-fledged media company, and it noted in the earnings release the importance of adding live-broadcast capability to its cameras. Last month, the company announced a long-term partnership with the National Hockey League that will see the league’s players and referees using GoPro cameras to film live action during games.
Also on Thursday, GoPro announced a deal with streaming media company Roku to add a GoPro channel to Roku’s portfolio of streaming content. GoPro previously announced a similar partnership with Microsoft’s Xbox gaming console.
