Xiaomi has positioned itself as one of the leading smartphone and gadget manufacturer in the world. With its constant innovation and latest products, Xiaomi is looking for exponential growth in coming years. To capitalise on these plans, Xiaomi has also been making offers to buy the popular action camera company GoPro, as reported by Bloomberg. While Xiaomi hasn’t come up with some steaming statements about the same, this is not the first time that GoPro is talking about a merger or a sellout. Apparently, last year has been a letdown for GoPro in terms of revenue where the company saw a steep decline in sales followed by a sudden decrease in demand for action cameras.
The company also called quits in the drone market and the CEO, Nick Woodman, was seen making statements about the same. He said, “If there was an opportunity to merge GoPro with a larger parent company, that could help us scale our business and provide a better return on investment […] we would welcome the opportunity to explore such an opportunity.”
Post the news broke out that Xiaomi was in talks for a buyout, the GoPro stock saw a sudden spike of 8.8 percent. However, Xiaomi is probably going to wait out the wave as they would not like to pay more for the company which is overvalued. According to the reports, the action camera company who is the maker of highly popular Hero camera series is speculated to be valued at approximately $1 Billion.
GoPro also closed the doors for its Karma drone division previously citing reasons like “an extremely competitive aerial market” and a “hostile regulatory environment.”
Post seeing the reports of dwindling demand for action cameras the company also slashed prices of Hero5 and Hero6 black in an attempt to fuel sales. It’s interesting to see what will be Xiaomi’s next step since they have released their own action camera which is the Mi Action Camera supporting 4K videos, however, if the deal goes through we expect to see a meteoric rise in Xiaomi’s action camera production quality.
