- "We believe an acquisition of GoPro (NASDAQ:GPRO) would make sense for Apple (AAPL); action cameras are uniquely positioned at the intersection of Apple’s smartphone, wearables, and multimedia offerings," writes FBR's Daniel Ives in a note about potential Apple buyout targets.
- Ives: "Additionally, GoPro’s new product cycles could open the door to areas where Apple’s competitors are investing heavily (e.g., drones, VR), and Cupertino has been playing catch-up. We also see strategic value in GoPro being integrated with Apple’s strong multimedia ecosystem (e.g., iTunes, Apple TV, etc.)."
- Media/ad software giant Adobe (ADBE - $44.4B market cap), enterprise cloud storage/file-sharing leader Box (BOX - $1.6B market cap), and EV/battery maker Tesla (TSLA - $30B market cap) are also named as potential Apple targets. "Box would give Apple an avenue into enterprise storage and enable it to expand its product tentacles (hardware/storage) into the enterprise cloud frontier ... Adobe would provide a nice pipeline into the enterprise ... Adobe’s Document Cloud/Marketing Cloud applications are helping enterprises grapple with the growth of digital marketing, proliferation of mobile devices in the enterprise, and IOT."
- The GoPro remarks come with the action camera leader down 82% from its Oct. 2014 high of $98.47, and sporting a $2.4B market cap. In other news, GoPro announced today it has added Apple Watch support for its iOS app.
- Recent GoPro coverage
- Update (11:48AM ET): GoPro is now up 8.9%. Also announced today: GoPro states its drone (due in 1H16) will be known as Karma. A teaser video has been released.
- Update 2 (2:30PM ET): GoPro is now up 14%. Given a short interest of 31.2M shares (47% of the float) as of Nov. 30, short-covering is likely playing an important role.