The path GoPro seems to be going down in its third quarter sounds like an absolute nightmare.

Banking on the release of their latest camera and drone to earn them some cash dollar, the company lost out on their ability to impress investors by only releasing the new products in October, resulting in very, very poor third quarter ratings, explains Tech Crunch.

The consequence? Read on…

Expectations were already incredibly low for GoPro this go around and yet somehow the company managed to eclipse even the worst fears of analysts. The company’s stock trading was halted prior to the release of results that missed revenue expectations by 23 percent and nearly $75 million.

When trading began again, shares were down 22 percent. This means that, in a matter of minutes, the market cap of the company melted from $1.23 billion to $972 million — the spontaneous combustion of roughly $250 million in value.

Prior to the actual release of this quarter’s earnings results, investors had been focused on one thing — projected sales for Q4. Today’s posted revenue of $240.56 million and a loss of $0.60 per share is so bad, however, that it’s likely to change the whole conversation. For reference, in advance of today’s release, the consensus among Wall Street analysts was that shareholders could expect a loss of $0.36 per share on revenues of $314.06 million.

As Tech Crunch suggests, GoPro’s lack of trend foresight might hurt them more than anything else, as their “late start to addressing those growing markets shows a lack of direction from the company.”

Earlier this year Woodman told TechCrunch that he had aspirations to turn GoPro into a “lifestyle media company.” It seems those plans may have to be put on hold as the company told investors to expect “2017 to be more of an evolutionary year, rather than a revolutionary year.”

Is this the end of GoPro? Let’s check in after Christmas.

[source:techcrunch]