GoPro continues rise on day two of trading, now up nearly 50% from IPO price, as NASDAQ surges to highest point since spring of 2000
Wall Street Beat: GoPro continues to soar after IPO as Nasdaq surges — Shares of action-camera maker GoPro shot up again Friday, a day after its IPO …
Context & Ripple Effects
GoPro's day-two surge caps a fast arc: the company filed confidentially in February and then publicly on May 19 with 2013 revenue of $985.7M, up 87.4% year over year, pricing its NASDAQ listing this week. From the start it pitched itself not as a camera maker but as a media business built on user-generated content, per its February filing coverage.
The pickup is unusually broad for a day-two story — the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes, IBTimes, Outside Magazine and others all ran it — which signals Wall Street treating GoPro as a bellwether for whether consumer-hardware IPOs can price hot again. It also hands NASDAQ a clean, high-profile listing to point to after its bungled handling of Facebook's 2012 IPO.
First-order effects
- GoPro's early public-market investors are sitting on roughly 50% gains within two sessions, and the company now has a richer acquisition currency and easier access to follow-on capital than its $100M filing suggested.
- NASDAQ gets its strongest index reading since spring of 2000 alongside a marquee successful listing — a reputational offset to the losses investors took when it mishandled Facebook's 2012 debut.
Second-order effects
- A hot first week reprices the whole consumer-camera and wearable category: rivals and would-be issuers can argue their hardware businesses deserve software/media multiples, while private action-camera players face a costlier bar for late-stage funding.
- The rally sharpens scrutiny of GoPro's media-empire framing — if the stock keeps trading on content ambitions rather than unit sales, management is under pressure to show monetization beyond cameras before the IPO lockup expires.
Third-order effects
- If GoPro sustains the premium, the template for consumer-hardware exits shifts toward 'hardware plus owned media' narratives, pushing device makers to build content platforms they may not operationally need.
- A strong reception for a hardware name helps reopen the consumer-tech IPO window broadly, encouraging a queue of gadget and wearable issuers that will test how deep investor appetite really runs beyond one ticker.
The trend: Consumer-hardware companies are going public by selling media-platform stories, and GoPro's hot debut is testing whether investors will pay software multiples for camera makers.