GoPro - Earnings Call - Q4 2020
February 4, 2021
Transcript
Operator (participant)
Good day and welcome to the GoPro Q4 2020 earnings conference call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Christopher Clark. Please go ahead, sir.
Christopher Clark (VP of Corporate Communications)
Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to GoPro's fourth quarter and full year earnings conference call. With me today are GoPro CEO Nicholas Woodman and CFO and COO Brian McGee. Before we get started, I'd like to remind everyone that our remarks today may include forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements and all other statements that are not historical facts are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties which may cause actual results to differ materially. Additionally, any forward-looking statements made today are based on assumptions as of today, including but not limited to uncertainty related to the duration and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. This means that results could change at any time, and our commentary about business results and outlook is based on the information available as of today's date.
We do not undertake any obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. Information concerning our risk factors is available in our most recent annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2019, and quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2020, each of which is on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission and is updated in future filings with the SEC, including the annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2020. Today, we may discuss gross margin, operating expense, net profit and loss, as well as basic and diluted net profit and loss per share in accordance with GAAP and additionally on a non-GAAP basis. We believe that non-GAAP information is useful because it can enhance the understanding of our ongoing economic performance.
We use non-GAAP reporting internally to evaluate and manage our operations. We choose to provide this information to enable investors to perform comparisons of operating results in a manner similar to how we analyze our own operating results. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP operating expenses can be found in the press release that was issued this afternoon and which is posted on our website. In addition to the earnings press release, we have posted management commentary and slides containing detailed financial data and metrics for the fourth quarter and full year 2020. The management commentary and slides, as well as the link to today's live webcast and the replay of this conference call, are posted on the GoPro Investor Relations website for your reference. All income statement-related numbers that are discussed today during the call, other than revenue, are non-GAAP unless otherwise noted.
Now I'll turn the call over to GoPro's founder and CEO, Nicholas Woodman.
Nicholas Woodman (CEO)
Thank you, Chris, and good afternoon, everyone. Before we get started, I'd like to encourage everybody to read the commentary we posted earlier today to the GoPro Investor Relations page on our website. In addition to providing an overview of our quarterly and annual results plus forward-looking guidance, the commentary provides our thoughts on our business going forward. I will now share some brief remarks, and then we'll go directly into Q&A. In 2020, we evolved GoPro into a more efficient, subscription-oriented direct-to-consumer business. We grew our GoPro subscriber base by 145% year over year to 601,000 subscribers and generated more than $200 million in cash flow from operations in the second half of the year. This represented 33% of our second half revenue and contributed to a year-end cash balance of $328 million.
Strong Q4 performance resulted in $0.39 of non-GAAP EPS for the quarter and $0.08 of non-GAAP EPS for the year. We achieved this with disciplined expense management, an approach we are committed to maintaining. Our 2020 performance amidst the pandemic demonstrates GoPro's enduring relevance as a personal experience-sharing solution for consumers and powerful creative tool for professionals. Looking ahead, our plan is to continue super-serving our core customers with outsized GoPro subscriber benefits while expanding our relevance to users of other cameras and smartphones through software subscription offerings. We believe we can maintain our rapid pace of innovation, launching exciting new hardware and software products backed by significant world-class marketing, all within reasonable spend levels that are directionally in line with 2020. We're excited about 2021, even amidst the pandemic. We've proven time and again that GoPro can thrive during challenging times.
We believe the steps we're taking to strengthen our business today will benefit us in spades when the world eventually rebounds from the pandemic in earnest. Fortunately, as a business, we do not have to wait for that to happen. I want to thank our employees around the world for their resilience and adaptability throughout 2020. Your dedication and world-class execution is why we are well-positioned for the future. Now, operator, we're ready to take questions.
Operator (participant)
All right. If you would like to ask a question, you may signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please ensure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. A voice prompt on the phone line will indicate when your line is open. Again, that is star one to ask a question. We'll pause for just a moment to allow everyone an opportunity to signal. All right. We'll take the first question from Paul Chung with JPMorgan.
Paul Chung (Associate)
Hi. Thanks for taking my question. Just on your full year 2021 guidance, given the large kind of seasonal mix in the second half, what kind of gives you the confidence in providing some visibility there? What kind of large factors can sway this higher to maybe possibly rebound to that 4 million kind of unit selling per year that you've done in the past? I have a follow-up.
Brian McGee (CFO and COO)
Yeah. Hi, Paul. This is Brian. Let's talk about 2020. We sold through 3.6 million units, and we shipped in about 2.8 million units. That delta is because we took channel inventory down about 800,000 units and ended the year at about 650,000 units in the channel. That is an important distinction to make. We think we've got the right channel inventory in place. As we look to 2021, we expect to continue on the D2C transition and shift our revenue up from the 32% that we had in 2020 to 38%-42% in 2021. I'd say we have very good visibility into the first quarter, and our trends from a sell-through and sell-in perspective are hitting the mark related to our guide of $185 million in Q1.
We think on a range that sell-through is going to be in the 2.4 million units-2.6 million units right now and sell-in in the kind of 3.2 million units-3.4 million units. We may see about 100,000 unit or so reduction in the channel even in 2021. That is really due to the fact that we are growing; our expectation is to grow more in D2C. We would continue to trim retail inventories a bit and keep them at healthy levels going into the end of 2021 and into 2022.
Paul Chung (Associate)
Gotcha. Thanks for that. Then your unit sell-through was off by maybe around 100,000 relative to guidance. Kind of what drove the difference there? I noticed regionally, India and Asia were a bit softer, and you mentioned the pandemic. Is there kind of more preference for North American consumers to kind of go to the website? What's been the split overseas for GoPro.com sales? How are you driving more traffic there? Any comments you can make? Thanks.
Nicholas Woodman (CEO)
Yeah. GoPro.com did great. Record quarter, we doubled the business year-on-year, year-over-year basis in that 92% sequentially. Terrific performance on GoPro.com. Our revenue came in within our guidance. Within the split between retail and consumer, we were within like 5% of our revenue was kind of split between. It went a little bit more heavy to retail than D2C. We definitely saw some slowness in EMEA and APAC channels, largely related to COVID. North America did do well and better than what we expected and made up for some of that in Europe and in Asia. We've also taken that into account as we looked at our forecast for Q1. Our trending on sell-through, we think, is trending right into the 700,000 units that was provided on the commentary.
Paul Chung (Associate)
Okay. Great. Then.
Brian McGee (CFO and COO)
Paul, just to add one more bit of color, specifically to your visitors, there does not seem to be a preference with consumers for shopping offline versus online in certain regions like EMEA or Asia. The answer to that is no. We definitely saw strong dot-com performance and then some softness as COVID lockdowns ramped up and consumer online shopping did take a hit as a part of that. We could map the softness to COVID lockdowns intensifying in certain regions. There does not seem to be a headwind for us as it relates to growing our business internationally. The headwind is specifically the pandemic.
Paul Chung (Associate)
My last question is on the GoPro subs, very good progress there. What kind of features are users engaging with the most? Next year, when we kind of lap that large cohort of subs from year nine sales, what kind of gives you the confidence in low churn rates and retention? Are there any kind of cumbersome or high switching costs for consumer, maybe related to stores, that would kind of deter them from moving off GoPro subscription service? Thanks.
Nicholas Woodman (CEO)
The consumer behavior and their taking advantage of the various GoPro subscription benefits is mapping to the consumer insights research that we did and that we do ongoing to understand what are the biggest drivers for people signing up as a subscriber. I'm happy to say that they're taking advantage of the key benefits. That gives us a good feeling as it relates to subscribers getting value out of the subscription. They're making use of the subscription benefits ongoing. That just points to an engaged customer that we believe we're going to be able to do a good job of retaining. We have, as we've shared, very impressive retention and low churn rates. We're really happy with those.
We continue to drive those down as we continue to improve both the marketing of the subscription, driving awareness of the benefits so that consumers can take advantage of them. They are happier customers, and we have better retention. That is all moving in the right direction. We feel really good about that. That is just where we are today in February. We have a lot on tap for the rest of the year to further improve retention and keep churn low.
Brian McGee (CFO and COO)
Paul, the thing I guess I would add on top of it is we have that visibility. We are seeing solid traction even in Q1 on GoPro.com. That's also what's helping to drive up our ASPs. We're seeing margin improvement. We saw it in Q4. We've given a little bit of an expanded margin in our guide for 2021, 38%-39%. The implied guidance or in our management commentary would point to a very profitable GoPro in 2021 with, again, solid cash generation in the $150 million or so range. We are very happy with how the results went in Q4 and the look ahead in 2021.
Paul Chung (Associate)
Great. Thank you.
Operator (participant)
All right. Once again, that is star one to ask a question. If you find your question has been answered, you may remove yourself from the queue by pressing star two. Our next question is from Andrew Uerkwitz with Oppenheimer and Company.
Andrew Uerkwitz (Managing Director and Senior Analyst)
Hey, gentlemen. Thanks for letting me ask a couple of questions. The first one, I guess, is probably for Nick. With the new, I guess, the new subscription, the $9.99 subscription, presumably this is trying to capture the NAUs that are using the GoPro app that don't have cameras. How should we think about that number as it fits into your subscription number for the year? If you could shed any light on how you'll hopefully convert those folks to traditional GoPro users.
Nicholas Woodman (CEO)
Sure. Thanks, Andrew. Yeah. We're really excited about the upcoming revamp and subscription-based offering of the GoPro app. You're spot on. It's a way for us to serve as a personal content solution, helping users of any camera, including smartphones, get the most out of their personal photos and videos. We all suffer from the bottomless pit that is our camera roll. You know the feeling when you get a great capture, a great photo or video, or have one sent to you, and you save it to your camera roll. You have that moment where you wistfully look at it, and you acknowledge there's a good chance you're never going to see that again. That's a very widespread problem shared by everybody that uses a phone. With a phone, they're lucky because they actually know where their photos and videos are.
With the upcoming GoPro app revamp with the mural wall feature, it makes it really easy for you as a user to send that photo or video that you know the moment you see it, that that's something that you're going to want to keep track of and revisit later. You send it to the app. You don't even have to open the app to have it go there. You can send it straight from your camera roll. It will be presented to you on your mural, which serves as a chronological feed of your personal favorite moments. Combined with that are all of our top-tier powerful editing tools, auto video generation capabilities. Ultimately, the GoPro app is going to scale over time as the most enabling yet simple app to help you get the most out of your personal content.
We think that this is a significant-sized market globally. We think our brand is really well-positioned to solve this problem for people. Importantly, we have the brand to drive awareness, to grow usage of this app at what we believe will be impressive scale. It is directly in our wheelhouse where you do not have to take on very much additional OpEx to go and make this possible for people that do not own a GoPro because we are already building this solution for GoPro users. By making it subscription-based, we can extend access to it to anybody that owns a smartphone or another camera. Over time, we think that this is going to become a really meaningful solution for people that is going to punch way above its weight class in terms of its value proposition to what a user will pay to use it on an annual basis.
We're pretty excited about it.
Andrew Uerkwitz (Managing Director and Senior Analyst)
Yeah. Got it. I appreciate that additional color. I guess the next question I have for.
Nicholas Woodman (CEO)
I guess.
Andrew Uerkwitz (Managing Director and Senior Analyst)
Yeah. Go ahead.
Nicholas Woodman (CEO)
It was one part of your question, and the answer is the Quik app, which we sunsetted about a year and a half ago, has roughly 8.6 million monthly active users. That's a free app. It's very outdated relative to the new GoPro app experience. It's a pretty significant opportunity for us to market the new GoPro app experience to these Quik users and migrate them over time to the GoPro app. Of course, we have the roughly 5 million monthly active users of the GoPro app itself that, assuming they're not already GoPro subscribers for $49.99 a year, that's also an opportunity for us to upsell them to the $10 a year functionality that includes the mural experience as well as a slew of premium editing tools that we're going to roll out over time.
Those are just two of many growth initiatives that we've got for this new subscription service.
Andrew Uerkwitz (Managing Director and Senior Analyst)
Got it. Got it. That's helpful. I guess when I think about your unit guidance for 2021, it looks like it's coming in a little bit down year over year. On a sell-through basis, sorry, on a sell-through basis, is that mostly just caution around COVID, or is there something more to it related to just fewer stores and just a further decline in retail? Any color there would be helpful.
Brian McGee (CFO and COO)
Yeah. Hi, Andrew. It's Brian. It's really just a number thing. COVID, for one, and being cautious, I think as the world opens up, there's opportunity to expand that. As you recall, last year, early on in 2020, we were at about 3.2 million units to 3.4 million units. We raised it up to 3.6 million units, same with sell-through. We have the ability to step it up, and that would increase profitability further because we get a lot of financial leverage from that. I think that's all of that side. We will also see more movement to the high end, our $300 and more price point, and less on the lower end as well. That's helping to drive ASPs. It's going to be supported in GoPro.com. That's helping with margins and profitability. We think it's on balance with visibility we have today.
I think there's hopefully upside as the world comes back.
Andrew Uerkwitz (Managing Director and Senior Analyst)
Got it. This last question, it looks like based on your guidance, your cash balance by the end of the year is going to be a healthy amount, one we have not seen in a while. How is that affecting your view on potential investment opportunities, whether it is M&A or internal? How are you thinking about that use of cash going forward?
Brian McGee (CFO and COO)
Yeah. There are a few uses of cash. In 2022, we'll pay back, I think, $125 million of debt, right, on the convert. There is more in 2025. We split that up and actually paid some off early in Q4, which was good. I think from an OpEx perspective, we said we would continue to be hawkish. We will continue to invest in innovation and technology and improving the website experience for GoPro.com. Those are key initiatives for the company that'll take investment. There are other areas that we'll be able to be more prudent and cut back. We want to stay in the $305 million-$315 million range for OpEx in 2021. It is upside because our revenue is up too. That is also contributing to go up. We are definitely going to make those investments and be prudent about our cash balances.
Actually, to your point, we're at $328 million ending the year of 2020. We haven't had a $300 million number in cash for a number of years. The cash generation in the second half was well above $200 million, which was those are records for the company. Two quarters in a row where we had $100 million in operating cash flow.
Andrew Uerkwitz (Managing Director and Senior Analyst)
Got it. Thank you so much, guys. Great quarter.
Brian McGee (CFO and COO)
Thank you.
Operator (participant)
All right. We'll take the next question from Jim Suva with Citigroup Investment Research.
Jim Suva (Managing Director)
Thank you, Nick and Brian. I sincerely want to say congratulations on managing through a very, very, very challenging year of 2020. Quite remarkable results. I have one question for Brian and one for Nick. Brian, you being CFO, normally we talk to you about seasonality, quarter to quarter. I realized 2020 was very difficult, and you gave in your commentary some very good 2021 outlooks. For revenues and EPS, is seasonality kind of still in place largely or with COVID lapping us? I am thinking about vaccines being prevalent more as we increase through the year, and maybe people go on vacations and travel and do more extreme stuff later on in the year. Is there a chance the second half could be even seasonally stronger, stronger, stronger than expected? I am just kind of wondering about what you built into your guidance.
For Nick, CEO, your move to subscription model has been fantastic. Are there a couple of apps or interface items or variables, whether it be video editing or the upload function, that really surpassed your expectations? It seems to really draw the subscriber base in even more. I was just kind of wondering because I know that you have a lot of enhancements, which one, two, or three really are bringing in so much. Thank you.
Brian McGee (CFO and COO)
Yeah. Hi, Jim. Thank you. Let me start. We expect on a year-over-year basis to grow in every quarter in 2021 over 2020. The biggest growth, of course, will be in quarter one and quarter two because we'll be up. Our guidance implies 55% growth in Q1 2021 over Q1 2020. Obviously, in the first half is when the pandemic hit of 2020. There will be some seasonality. Q2 and Q4 tend to be seasonally stronger for the company. You should expect that kind of in the modeling.
Jim Suva (Managing Director)
Great. Thanks, Brian. Nick, anything on the apps that really is bringing the subs so much?
Nicholas Woodman (CEO)
Yeah. It's a good question. As I shared before, we're happy to see that both our research and the reality of how consumers are taking advantage of subscription benefits are aligning. Of course, the savings at GoPro.com are important. We're seeing the lion's share of lifestyle goods and accessory sales going to subscribers who are taking advantage of the 30%-50% savings that they get at GoPro.com on non-camera items. That's really good to see because that shows, one, that there's a comprehension of those savings. Two, we're seeing subscribers pay for their $49.99 annual subscription very quickly with the savings that they're getting through their backpacks or their mounts and accessories for their cameras, the hats and shirts that they're buying. There's real value there. It adds up quickly to the $49.99 annual GoPro subscription. That's a really positive sign.
As it relates to the app, content backup is really important to our customers. We're a company that helps people capture some of the most exciting and meaningful moments in their lives, and they want to safeguard those moments. Our cloud backup is of significant value, and we're seeing good usage there. The editing tools that we offer in the GoPro app are really important to our subscribers. That's one of the reasons we're really excited about the upcoming GoPro app revamp because we're going to be introducing new editing tools at a steady clip for our customers ongoing. As well, of course, the mural content management wall, which is going to do a phenomenal job of helping people keep track of the content that they're capturing and generating and easily share from their wall.
We think it's going to be a significant enhancement to the overall experience, building on what our customers are already using and capitalizing on the feedback they're giving us of what they want to see next. Kudos to our consumer research team and our product teams for both going out and learning what our customers want from us and then going and building it for them. It's paying off in spades. I think that's the underlying strength in the business that you see is that GoPro is serving a real purpose in people's lives, and we're doing a terrific job of it. I think that's why you're seeing the business perform so well.
Jim Suva (Managing Director)
Congratulations to you and your team on a great year and looking forward to 2021. Thank you.
Brian McGee (CFO and COO)
Thank you, Jim.
Nicholas Woodman (CEO)
We're really looking forward to 2021 because if GoPro can perform this way amidst a pandemic, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, we do not need the—we all want the pandemic to go away for obvious reasons. As a business, we're not sitting around waiting for that to happen. We're driving a successful and growing business, and we're well poised for when the world begins to snap back.
Operator (participant)
All right. We'll take the next question from Nik Torodov with Longbow Research.
Nik Torodov (Senior Research Analyst)
Yeah. Thanks, guys. Brian and Nick, when you guys announced your plans to transition to a direct business model in Q2, at the time, I think you expected GoPro.com to become a majority of your sales in 2021. You guided below 50% for GoPro.com in 2021. I think the fourth quarter was the second quarter in a row where GoPro.com sales came a little bit lower than their expectations. I just wonder, has anything changed since the original comment you made when you announced the plans to go direct? Should we think that GoPro.com, should we expect GoPro.com to become a majority of your sales at some point in time?
Brian McGee (CFO and COO)
Let me start with that one, Nikolay. When we first talked about that back in May, retail was completely shut, quite frankly. We sold on our website, and I believe we were over 40% in Q2 of 2020. It also was not clear how retail was going to come back, quite frankly, and when the pandemic was going to end. We could have visibility on our own business, which on our site, we doubled it on a year-over-year basis. Since then, we have seen retail come back. It is still an important channel. We have two strong channels that we get product to consumers, GoPro.com plus a retail channel globally. That is actually a real advantage, I think, from a distribution perspective for the company that we have that reach, whether it be GoPro.com or retail.
GoPro.com is obviously a more profitable channel for us, and we'll continue to drive that in subscriptions. No, we're very happy with the fact that we were able to, throughout 2020, raise our numbers. Part of that was due to retail coming back, and a good chunk of it was GoPro.com driving quite a lot of business.
Nicholas Woodman (CEO)
Yeah. I would add to that, you're never going to hear us complain about retail coming back better than expected and being a healthy channel for us. I mean, thank God for our retailers, and many thanks to them for their continued support of GoPro. We've got a saying. One of our core values at GoPro is strength in numbers. Going it alone is a lot riskier than when you've got a number of strategic partners to help you succeed. That's the case at GoPro.
That said, the bounce back of our retail channel's performance is actually helpful to GoPro because it reduces the risk significantly as we continue to make investments to improve our direct-to-consumer capabilities, whether it's being able to do a better job of direct marketing to consumers more as an individual as opposed to just a mass market blast to everybody and not even sure who owns a camera or not. Those are investments that we're making that are going to yield significant returns for us this year. As well, we're investing significantly in our e-commerce platform to do a much better job of merchandising the cameras, upselling accessories, and again, having a better understanding of who the customer is and what they might actually want to buy from us and where they are in their GoPro life cycle. These are all investments and developments that take time.
It is fantastic that our teams were able to double our direct-to-consumer GoPro.com revenues last year. Think about how quickly we had to do that and what improvements we were able to make to our approach from a technical standpoint. The team got a ton done, but it is just a fraction of the opportunity we have to enhance our capabilities. While we have a strong retail channel to help us drive our business while we make these investments and improve our direct-to-consumer capabilities, I do not see how that could possibly be seen as a negative.
Brian McGee (CFO and COO)
That is another way of answering your question that we absolutely see significant opportunity to grow our direct business over time. This is a marathon, not a sprint. There is just a lot of greenfield opportunity to improve our approach.
Nik Torodov (Senior Research Analyst)
Got it. Then, Nick, maybe a question on overall demand trends and sell-through. I mean, if I look at the implied full-year guidance, it sounds like you're still expecting sell-through to be down in the second half of the calendar year. I think most people operate under the impression that there's going to be some normalization from COVID. Maybe this is you're thinking differently, and that's part of the reason for that guidance. I think if we look at the broader consumer electronics space, I think the expectations are that there's, if not growth for 2021, that demand will be at least flat versus very challenging. Very easy to compare from 2020. How are you thinking about overall demand environment for GoPro as we go forward?
Nicholas Woodman (CEO)
I'll pick that up. Brian, if you want to add anything. We shared our demand outlook in terms of our guide. I think where we differ from traditional consumer electronics per se is that in many ways, we're tied to human activity. The more active humans, consumers are, the more they're out and about, the more they're celebrating life and sharing experiences, the more of a value proposition we represent to those consumers. If you're talking about streaming video game sales or video game platforms, consoles, or things that remain in the house, when somebody finally goes outside and travels more and is more active, we don't fall into that same stay-at-home consumer electronics category.
That relates to my point that we're very well positioned to succeed during the pandemic and even better positioned to thrive on another level as the world, even if it takes baby steps, bouncing back. You can imagine the outsized positive impact that can have on our business. Now, we're not factoring that into our guide. Our outlook is that the world continues to go along the way that it's been. In certain areas of the world, there'll be a better condition as it relates to the pandemic. In others, it might be hit harder. Net, net, we think that we're positioned to succeed. Make no mistake, the world will bounce back at some point, and we'll be there waiting.
Brian McGee (CFO and COO)
Nikolay, I think the other point to make is if we look at the distribution by quarter, it is more evenly distributed, which is actually kind of more normal, at least within the context we have Q4 going up for seasonality, of course. That enables us to be profitable in quarters two, three, and four. We saw we guided for basically break-even plus or minus, I think, three cents in Q1. We think we can be profitable in Q1. We have not done that in quite a long time. A very profitable GoPro in 2021 and continuing to generate a lot of cash. If the demand profile comes back stronger, as Nick had mentioned, as the world comes back, we have the opportunity to drive more profitability and more revenue growth.
We're forecasting 20%-25% up on a year-over-year basis, which is pretty darn good, most of that on units, but also some on ASP as we continue to shift to the high-end strategy we've taken on since basically 2019. That's worked very well for the company and for the consumers for the product they get.
Nik Torodov (Senior Research Analyst)
Okay. Thanks, Brian. The last question, Nick, I think last quarter you shared some metrics about conversion rate on the subscription on purchases through GoPro.com. I believe, if I'm not mistaken, that number was 80%-85% on people who bought flagship cameras. Maybe can you provide us an update on that metric? How should we think about conversion rates on retail? It seems like you mentioned it's much lower. I wonder if you can give us some numbers. Thanks.
Brian McGee (CFO and COO)
Yeah. Maybe I can start on that one, and then Nick can chime in. Yeah. On the conference call back in November, we saw the initial uptake for subscription on GoPro.com in the 80%-85% range, as you had mentioned. Through the quarter, that continued to climb. I believe we ended at close to 90% conversion on GoPro.com. It definitely stepped up, which helped the subscriber growth number. That has continued, quite frankly, even into Q1. That is a very nice metric. Organic through retail is obviously much lower. I think those rates are somewhere around 7%-12% kind of range. Obviously, the lion's share of subscribers is coming from GoPro.com.
Nik Torodov (Senior Research Analyst)
Okay. Got it. Thanks, guys. Good luck.
Brian McGee (CFO and COO)
Thank you.
Nicholas Woodman (CEO)
Thank you, Nikolay.
Operator (participant)
Once again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. We will take the next question from Erik Woodring with Morgan Stanley. Eric, your line is open if you would like to ask a question.
Erik Woodring (Managing Director and Head of US IT Hardware)
Hi, can you hear me? Yes.
Operator (participant)
Yes, we can hear you. Go ahead.
Erik Woodring (Managing Director and Head of US IT Hardware)
Okay. Perfect. Sorry about that, guys. I just wanted to follow up on one of Andrew's questions earlier. Obviously, significant cash balance. At the same time, your CapEx has fallen to, I think it was $5 million in 2020. I would love to get your outlook on how you think about that growing. If you do think about that growing into the future, why not ramp that higher as you are kind of building the business, becoming more profitable, generating more cash? I have a follow-up.
Nicholas Woodman (CEO)
Yeah. A lot of the CapEx, quite frankly, is related to two things: point-of-purchase displays in retail, which I think is the lion's share of it, and then tooling and such from an engineering perspective. We've been able to really do a good job managing much more tightly in engineering CapEx spend. Good on the engineering team for being much more prudent and efficient in how we go about doing that. That's important to note. POP, because we're reducing retail footprint, we don't need to spend as much money on POP. That's another reason why going more direct is actually a more efficient and effective method for us to go to market and better from a profitability perspective.
Erik Woodring (Managing Director and Head of US IT Hardware)
Okay. That's helpful. The second question would just be I love that you're trying to solve this problem of having all these pictures and videos lost in your camera roll. I can obviously—it's something I suffer from as well. I consider myself as someone that's aware of the brand. How are you guys going to get that brand awareness out to those consumers that perhaps aren't GoPro users and that are only smartphone users and perhaps don't know the GoPro brand as well? Just curious how you guys think about going about doing that. Thanks.
Nicholas Woodman (CEO)
There are a number of ways to drive awareness for apps that we'll be employing that we haven't really had to do before for the GoPro app because we really only target the GoPro app at GoPro hardware owners. That's true. It's not rocket science. We've had a lot of success with the Quik app, which I mentioned. We sunset that almost two years ago, and it still has 8.6 million monthly active users. It's incredibly well regarded in consumer reviews, very highly ranked in the app stores. We'll be employing the same tactics that we use to grow the popularity of the Quik app to scale the GoPro apps, the awareness of the GoPro app and its popularity outside of the GoPro community.
Make no mistake, I think the GoPro fan base, it's in the neighborhood of 45 million, 46 million social followers, direct followers. Of course, you have the extended follower base of all the influencers, athletes, and celebrities that we work with. It's a very large brand network that we've got that we're going to be leveraging to drive awareness of this new product that we've got. On the marketing front and on the branding front, we're feeling very good because I think we're pretty well regarded for being a strong marketing organization. It's all about value and really solving problems for people. As you know, when you have a great product and you make your customers successful, they also do a wonderful job of driving awareness for you through their advocacy.
Because the GoPro app is centered around helping you get the most out of your photos and videos, when you're doing that and sharing them more often from the GoPro app, that is also going to virally drive awareness for the app. The list goes on in terms of the number of ways that we have to drive awareness and ultimately scale the GoPro app subscription into something meaningful over time.
Erik Woodring (Managing Director and Head of US IT Hardware)
No, that's really helpful. Thank you for that color, Nick. I guess last question for Brian. Just curious, you guys obviously gave guidance for OpEx in 2021, but we're just curious how you're thinking about that from sales and marketing relative to R&D, relative to G&A perspective. If you're going all of those line items, if you're pulling back or growing some of them. Thanks.
Brian McGee (CFO and COO)
Yeah. I think we'll see some growth in R&D. There'll be a little bit of growth in sales and marketing, but some things we're able to spend less on are basically being offset by investment. We'll see reductions in GMA.
Erik Woodring (Managing Director and Head of US IT Hardware)
Okay. That's awesome. Thank you, guys.
Nicholas Woodman (CEO)
Thank you.
Operator (participant)
All right. It appears there are no further questions at this time. Mr. Woodman, I'd like to turn the conference back to you for any additional or closing remarks.
Nicholas Woodman (CEO)
Thank you, operator. Thank you, everyone. I'd like to reiterate our excitement for GoPro's future and for 2021, where we plan to super serve our customers through high-value subscription offerings and in parallel scale GoPro's margin, profitability, and importantly, predictability. We believe we can continue to succeed during this pandemic, which puts us in a strong position for when the world begins to recover in earnest. Thank you again to all of GoPro's employees and partners who are making this possible. We're grateful for this group win. Thank you to everyone for joining today's call. We genuinely appreciate your time and support. This is Team GoPro signing off.
Operator (participant)
This concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.