GoPro, Inc. has announced they will be laying off 7% of their 1,500 workers. They had a worse 4th quarter than expected and are suffering from a drop in their stocks. Wednesday afternoon, they went from 23.34% to 10.87%  and leveled out at 11.20% when trading was halted.

GoPro, Inc built up their staff over the past few years due to the success of their action camera line. By 2015, they had increased their staffing by 50%. Now “to better align resources,” they will be letting go of over 100 people from their company. With GoPro spiraling, it is hard to tell what they will try to do next.

They will need a new big release in 2016 if they want to stay on the board. They only released one notable product in 2015, Hero 4 Session. The CEO of the company eventually admitted though they priced the product too high and cut the price in half by the Holiday season.

Go Pro announced at CES they will be launching a 360-degree action camera and a quadcopter in 2016, but with Nikon and DJI also realeasing products into this market, it may not be enough to draw the crowds in. Go Pro will have to rely a lot on their brand name to make headway capturing these markets.

It will be interesting to watch whether or not if Go Pro can recover from this fall out as well as they would like. They would greatly benefit from a new, young innovator walking in the door and giving them a fresh new idea. They need a new edge. There is only so long you can release action cameras for, and Go Pro would benefit from finding the next big thing for camera’s or consumer action films.

Go Pro will be a company to watch over the next year. They are a great company and revolutionized the independent filming industry. I hope to see them come up with something big this year. It is one company I rather not see get lost in all the technological advances.