GoPro's (GPRO) HERO7 Black Customers Win Award of $1 Million

GoPro, Inc. GPRO recently announced the award recipients of its HERO7 Black Million Dollar Challenge. Also, the company published the crowd-sourced highlight video to its homepage.

In September, the company challenged its customers to use its new flagship camera — HERO7 Black — to shoot a product highlight video. In this regard, it made an offer of $1 million award to be shared by the customers whose video clips were featured.

As a matter of fact, more than 25,000 unique submissions from all over the world were received by the HERO7 Black Million Dollar Challenge. The final video included clips from 56 HERO7 Black users, featuring impressive visuals. The company will award a sum of about $17,500 to each person, whose clips were included in the Million Dollar Challenge video.

The HERO7 Black’s standout feature — HyperSmooth — sets a new bar with in-camera, gimbal-like video stabilization. TimeWarp, a stabilized time lapse function, provides a superior effect to videos as well as the ability to stream live from GoPro to social media platforms. Growing product sales will help the company enhance its top line, going forward.

Notably, GoPro’s new flagship camera witnessed record levels of social engagement at launch and achieved the highest week-one retail unit sales in the company's history. Also last year, it released the latest upgraded version of its wearable cameras — the HERO6.  The company is well positioned to launch the new products in the upcoming quarters. GoPro noted that it holds more than 85% of the action-camera market in the United States by unit volume.

Also, the company has been aiming toward transforming itself from the ‘camera maker’ to ‘content maker’ and has taken significant steps to diversify into higher-margin businesses including video editing and virtual reality. The company is developing various types of software solutions and hardware to curtail the complexity of managing, editing and sharing contents on different media platforms.

In the past three months, the Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) stock has lost 26.7% compared with the industry’s decline of 13.6%.

The company is taking steps to strengthen its position in the burgeoning virtual reality market. Overall, it remains optimistic about its prospects in end markets mainly on account of enhanced marketing programs, expense control measures, improving channel management and upcoming product launches.

Other Stocks to Consider

Some other top-ranked stocks in the same space are Sony Corporation SNE, Clarus Corporation CLAR and lululemon athletica inc. LULU. All these companies carry a Zacks Rank #2. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

Sony outpaced estimates thrice in the preceding four quarters, the average earnings surprise being 44.72%.

Clarus surpassed estimates twice in the trailing four quarters, the average positive earnings surprise being 252.08%.

lululemon athletica surpassed estimates in each of the trailing four quarters, the average positive earnings surprise being 19.47%.

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