Under U.S. law, companies are required to take such a step if their liquidity for the next twelve months is no longer secured. Such bad news rarely goes without consequences: it scares off investors, makes new loans more expensive, and sent GoPro’s stock price plummeting by as much as 14 percent at one point on Monday.

Dwindling reserves and expensive memory chips

To avert the looming bankruptcy, management says it is intensively seeking fresh capital, new credit lines, or strategic partners. The situation is serious: cash reserves have shrunk to around $50 million. The 2025 fiscal year was already a bitter one—with revenue of around $651 million, the company posted a net loss of over $80 million.

GoPro cites the skyrocketing prices of memory chips as the immediate catalyst. Because semiconductor giants like Samsung and Micron are massively shifting their production to high-bandwidth memory for the booming AI sector, standard DRAM for consumer electronics is becoming scarce and expensive. GoPro reports that purchase prices have, in some cases, doubled. For cameras in the price range between 300 and 500 francs, these additional costs can hardly be passed on to end customers on a one-to-one basis.

While GoPro long dominated the action camera market, competition from Asia has now overtaken the U.S. pioneer. Chinese manufacturers such as DJI and Insta360 now dominate key markets. Sales data from Japan shows just how rapidly this loss of market share is progressing: there, GoPro plummeted within a few years and now holds only a 19 percent market share.

As a first step, the California-based action camera pioneer has initiated a strict cost-cutting program. In addition to divesting assets, roughly a quarter of the workforce has been laid off since April. Behind the scenes, management is now ruling out neither a merger nor the complete sale of the company. However, the survival of the cult brand will be decided not only in the boardroom but above all in the marketplace: GoPro urgently needs to develop products that appeal to a broad base of consumers. It was only last April that the company attempted to turn the tide by specifically targeting the professional high-end segment with “Mission 1.”