GoPro to move U.S.-bound camera production out of China | Hacker News Reader

GoPro to move U.S.-bound camera production out of China

reuters.com

114 pointspetethomas48 comments

Does GoPro actually do their own development?

I remember reading an article when they were starting up, snd the founder basically went to some expo in a China and purchased OEM devices and slapped his brand on there.

Edit: This isn’t the article but it sheds some more light.

> Once he had the strap sorted out, Woodman would need a camera to go with it. He eventually found a 35-millimeter model made in China. Woodman made an old-school prototype using a Dremel tool, plastic blocks, and glue. He mailed it to China, wired $5,000 to get started, and in September 2004 GoPro made its first sale when a Japanese distributor ordered 100 units after seeing the product at a trade show.

https://www.maxim.com/gear/gopro-founder-nick-woodman-profil...

They do.

I am not sure that question required a throwaway account.

Sure? Privately Aricent used to claim they did a bunch of their R&D

There are an infinite number of shades of grey between “slap brand on an OEM product” and “the full Apple”. Companies often shift their approach (in both directions!) over time, and it will vary for different product lines.

And "the full Apple" is still someone else makes the product (Apple purchases iPhones from Foxconn):

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/29/technology/iphone-china-a...

Yes but Apple also finances the factories and is deeply embedded. The system might just be the most advanced integrated supply chain on the planet.

Sure, but plenty of companies actually assemble their own products (like say Samsung).

Samsung is not just samsung. Samsung is actually many companies working under the same brand and corporate culture.

You cant talk about samsung as a single company.

You're making a pretty pointless distinction though.

Apple tells Foxconn how, what, when etc to assemble often using equipment that Apple owns. So the only thing Samsung has over Apple is that they employ those people. And what value is that adding ?

> Apple purchases iPhones from Foxconn

It sounds like you think that Foxconn develop a new iPhone then Apple turn up to buy them like a consumer!

Foxconn manufacture iPhones under a precise contract with Apple, who do the design and plan how they should be built. Apple don’t just purchase them off the shelf.

Apple purchases labor from Foxconn

I was in Shenzhen last week, there are stores where you can go up, pick some battery pack or other widget, buy 1k units, and then have them slap your logo on it. That’s one end of the spectrum. The other is you find a Contract Manufacturer and give them your exact specs. But then of course what tends to happen is that other factories conveniently get your specs after awhile.

More to that story, the original analog GoPros and later digital ones are very different designs. Their first digital version definitely was an OEM product.

GoPro does develop its mobile apps, camera software and hardware, and cloud offerings. You can get a flavor for what the company is working on here: https://gopro.com/careers/jobs

We hired a bunch of GoPro hardware engineers at castAR. They were all good engineers.

Think it's a smart decision, the Chinese market is full of DJI or Xiaomi anyway, so they will not be losing any market share there.

What? The GoPros sold in the US will just be produced in a third country, the article doesn’t say where though. You can still get a Chinese made GoPro in China

The interesting bit is where GoPro will get the cameras for the US market produced.

>The interesting bit is where GoPro will get the cameras for the US market produced.

I'd guess Thailand or Japan. I clear international freight through customs for my primary income and see a lot of finished cameras, and even just CMOS, with the most common countries being China, Japan (e.g. Canon) and Thailand (e.g Nikon). A lot of complete digital still image AND video cameras come out of Japan and Thailand actually.

Interesting, because I was guess Mexico or maybe Foxconn in Brazil, but I guess it makes more sense with a country that already have camera production facilities.

Japan has a much higher manufacturing cost (it defeat the purpose of GoPro's move of evading tariff to reduce manufacturing cost.)

Thailand, on the other hand, has a mature digital imaging electronics manufacturing industry. Some of the lower end SONY digital cameras/electronics have been made in Thailand / Malaysia too.

> The interesting bit is where GoPro will get the cameras for the US market produced.

If silicon fab, die packaging, and rigid-flex sub-assembly of the critical camera piece were all done in China, then subsequently forwarded to another country which doesn't have a looming destination tariff threat for final assembly, would this risk still be interesting?

The PCB + sensor, while effectively are the 90% of device value, can still be justifiably declared to American customs at 110% of their cost in China, and many companies vying for coveted "made in USA" stamp do exactly that.

What comes after is easy to imagine, they are being put into a very expensive casing, and stamped with their new place of "origin."

You can research yourself how "made in USA" Google Pixels were made

If you look at the price difference between GoPro and clones you really are mostly paying for the brand.

Does all this stuff lately where companies are pulling out of china or the US or the US is arresting heads of companies etc feel like thucydides trap is just getting closer and closer?

Who would be the aggressor? China? Or the US?

Also - I had to look up "thucydides trap" so thanks for the new knowledge!

TIL that "Thucydides Trap" is NOT a form of hip hop featuring people cursing in Ancient Greek.

If you look at the history of the world there was an apparent (and counter intuitive) acceleration in the rate at which borders and governments were shifting, largely due to war and revolutions. Then we hit about 1945 and suddenly - it all but stopped. The only very large change being the fall of the Soviet Union, which did not involve direct war nor even revolution.

Nukes have made war between major powers a thing of the past, until they can be contained. 'Modern' nukes make Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like a joke. The 'Tsar Bomba' [1] is a nuclear weapon that was tested by Russia in 1961. Its yield, which was not at full capability, was more than three thousand times as powerful as Little Boy [2], the nuke that practically destroyed Hiroshima. You can't win wars against WMD.

A single missile that is failed to be detected or intercepted and you're looking at fatalities in the tens of millions. And there are thousands of these weapons operational and ready to fire today. Russia has even been developing a nuclear torpedo that's designed to create an artificial tsunami that would produce a devastating radioactive wave greater than 500 meters in height that would annihilate a target. The reason for a nuclear torpedo is to bypass all conventional anti-missile ballistic/laser/etc technology.

In my opinion the issue is relatively simple. If China's growth and development continues at even a fraction of its current pace they're going to become the most dominant nation in the world. This will change the world in unimaginable ways. The current powers on top are pretty happy with the status quo, and aren't ready to say goodnight just yet. Traditional war is not an option so I expect we're going to see a continuing increase in aggression on the two new fronts of war: economic and information.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy

For a while the trend has been towards smaller nukes (called tactical nukes), not bigger ones like in the 60s. The rational being that smaller, more precise nukes have a lower threshold of usability. Destroying Beijing and killing 20M people is a solution of last recourse, and would be disproportionate in retaliation to a tactical nuke, or a conventional attack resulting in massive casualties.

One reference I could find: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/09/us-to-loosen...

[EDIT] Of course even these tactical nukes are way more powerful than the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

isn't there an american icbm that is capable of basically "carpet bombing" an area with these smaller nukes? i think the point of it was to increase devastation not decrease it since immediate death after a nuke decreases with distance

the nuclear tsunami thing made me laugh until i thought about how hard it would be to stop

Americans consistently underestimated China out of a sense of arrogance I think. Becoming factory of the world was never the end game. Just the mid stage. Xiaoping was planning 50 years ahead. He wasn't thinking that China would always rely on low payed factory jobs.

Take mobile phones as an example: Chinese brands were knockoffs a couple of years ago. Now they are innovating and setting standards.

Go to Amazon and search for go pro and you will see tons of white label Chinese products at quater of the price with exact same specs. Considering Amazon accounts for half of eCommerce, I can’t imagine the impact of sales for GoPro. Another examples are headlamps, computer peripherals, cables, headphones, hardware tools, coffee makers and so on. There is a massive brand extinction in progress where Western brands which took comfort in designing at home and manufacturing in China are confronted with exact same goods much cheaper. One thing I don’t understand is why companies like Go Pro can’t stop these clones entering US markets which clearly violated their design copyrights, patents, specs and sometimes even same sounding trademarks.

I think GoPro has kind of doomed themselves.

1. Customer service is horrible/nonexistent. [1]

2. They made their camera app need an internet connection for no good reason (except to track their customers). [2]

[1] https://community.gopro.com/t5/Cameras/On-HOLD-for-2-and-a-H...

[2] https://community.gopro.com/t5/GoPro-Apps-for-Mobile/Hey-Thi...

> GoPro has been trying to drive demand for its trademark action-cameras - once a must-have for surfers, skydivers and other action junkies — as competition ramps up.

What are some better alternatives to GoPro available in Europe now? I mean original brands, not cheaper clones.

https://www.google.com/search?q=What+are+some+better+alterna...

The Yi action cameras seem to get good reviews, and Sony action cameras have some of the best image stabilization around. DJI has recently gotten into the small cam battle with the Osmo Pocket as well (I hesitate to say action cam because I don't believe it is waterproof or shock proof)

Well you can't unlick a turd. They get all their cameras knocked off for $30 and now they want to move their production out of China?

They stated the reason why they are moving their US-bound production out of China is to avoid financial shortcomings from the current tariff issues.

They even said that the non-US bound production is staying in China.

One interesting thing to note. You might've seen countless GoPro "clones," and might've been wondering why GoPro never seemed to assert their rights.

What is said in Shenzhen is that original digital GoPros themselves were an off the shelf OEM product, and GoPro never bothered to buy the design rights from their OEM.

Does anybody remember Daisy Photoclip from around year 2002? Their OEM had their hand in that. And yes, Daisy Photoclip was as Bulgarian as Iphone was American

There are countless X "clones" for any popular (and even unpopular!) consumer electronics devices. Apple certainly asserts their rights and yet you can still buy knockoff iPhones and even visit knockoff physical Apple Stores.

What do you want to say here? I don't understand.

Probably that it's a fight one can't "win". Better focus on the brand and making people aware of it and it's benefits.

My point is that they never bought the right for the design from OEM from whom they bought their first digital cameras, and that OEM itself never bothered to limit access to the design as it makes no money to them.

And my point is that has nothing to do with why there are cheap knockoffs as there are cheap knockoffs of all well known consumer electronics (fake iPhones even come out before the real iPhones!).

I don't think the rights to a 10-year-old design have much to do with what GoPro and their copycats are selling now. Knockoffs are everywhere, especially where the market-defining product has a large margin.

> "might've been wondering why GoPro never seemed to assert their rights."

That it has nothing to do with asserting rights, how the original product was developed or anything GoPro has done since. It's just how the world works.

It's how the world works after 50 years of American CEOs shipped all of their employer's IP to China in return for the margin boost that would give them a better stock option bonus for the 5-7 years before they could wash their hands of the company.

Thanks. I have this same view for a long time.

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