Hello. I am Doug Croits, Senior Media and Entertainment Equity Research Analyst at TD Cowen. Glad to have you all here with me today. We really appreciate your participation in today's event. As you see from the many signs posted in the venue, our firm values the annual XTEL/III Investor Poll that will open for balloting next week. If you think we've earned it, we'd be very grateful for your recognition with a five-star vote for TD Cowen. With that, happy to introduce Michael Potter, CFO of Corsair Gaming. Michael, great to have you here today.
Thanks, Doug. I'm happy to be back and get a chance to chat with you. As I've done the last little while, I think I'll start off with a few intro slides, just talking about the company, and then jump into your questions. I think we've come here every year. Pretty much it's been happening with COVID interruptions since we went IPO, so always very appreciative of the invite. Corsair is a leading gaming PC company, so pretty much anything you need for gaming PC building or for streaming gear, we provide that within our brands. Recently added Fanatec, which is high-end racing sim products as well. Very, very top level. We're over 30 years old. We've been a leader in different parts of the industry for a very long time. We've grown organically quite strongly. We've also tucked in some key strategic acquisitions over the years.
Some of our main brands, of course, they're obviously the big mothership brand. We have Drop, Elgato, Fanatec, Origin, and SCUF. All the brands that are not Corsair are ones we've acquired over the years, and they've all added to our growth and helped expand our capabilities as we do it. For Q1 highlights, it was a nice solid year for the start to the year. Components business grew nicely over the year. That's driven by the GPU launch cycle, which I know Doug has some questions. I'm pretty sure waiting for me on that. Peripherals grew quite nicely last year, and this year it grew also in Q1, pushed mainly by the Fanatec acquisition. Again, great gross margins in Q1, particularly in peripherals, but components gross margins also went up quite strongly. Our products are pretty much gaming PC. It's everything from the case in.
Everything but the GPU, the CPU, and the motherboard you need to build a high-end gaming PC, we can do. The peripherals business is keyboards, mice, and headsets, which is the standard set of gaming gear that you would use. For streaming gear, our Elgato brand provides pretty much everything you need to do live streaming of your game or whatever other content you want to do. The Fanatec product on top of that lets you do a very, very top-end racing sim experience. We have a lot of partnerships we have done over the last few years. There are some pictures of a new Porsche wheel that Fanatec came out with. We have a strong partnership with Call of Duty that we started late last year.
I think the new Doom game, we have a partnership with this just started with the release that just happened. We do partner with leading games and in the case of Fanatec, leading car and racing companies. The gaming market itself continues to grow and do well. Whenever there are new great games, there is always extra attention to it. There is a GPU launch cycle going on now, and that is also giving us a lot of tailwinds. Strong growth over the years. If you look at our numbers before COVID to where they are today and kind of take the boom and the bust time of COVID out of the equation, you will see there has been very strong and quite nice growth. Demographically, the younger you are, the more time and more hours you spend gaming. That market is certainly growing for us.
Fanatec is pretty much fully integrated. We bought that September last year. We bought out of bankruptcy. The product and the people were great, but the business processes and the supply chain was a little bit hurt. We did a lot of work to kind of remediate that, focus a lot on customer experience to make sure the people that bought our products can get good customer service and good follow-on if they had any questions or issues. We also brought them into our Corsair systems, which was pretty much finished by the end of Q1. Very much on track and a great business and a great brand to have. This is an example of the new steering wheel and this sort of high-end steering wheel that Fanatec can do.
If you've ever been to an F1 race, like all the fan zones, they tend to have a racing sim you can sit in with the full gear. Most of the time it's Fanatec that you'll see. If you ever visit our headquarters in Milpitas, we've got a nice rig set up in the lobby if you want to sit and give it a try. It is quite a nice product. Elgato actually moved a little bit into the broadcast field as well. Stream Deck were being used by a lot of broadcast companies, Stream Deck being like sort of a super macro keyboard that lets you run stuff easily while you're doing live things. They wanted a rack-mounted system that uses RFID as well and has Ethernet connection in it. We added all of that for the broadcast industry, and we released that very recently.
Xeon Edge is sort of an interesting sidecar type of concept for a monitor. You can have it in the case or as part of the case itself or right next to your regular monitor. A lot of people like a few things they want to keep track of, and they do not want to use up a big whole screen for that. It is an innovative product that we have aimed at the gaming and the streaming market. I said our results were quite good recently, and they have continued to do well with a good Q1 result. I will go over and let Doug ask his questions.
Great. Thank you, Michael. Maybe first we can dispense with the topic that I think has been top of everyone's mind for a few months, which is tariffs. It seems like the story changes every day. Can you talk about what kind of impact, if any, there has been on your business so far, and what are the key variables you're focused on going forward?
I guess the good news for us for tariffs is for the U.S. market, we weren't shipping a lot from China directly into the U.S. for quite a while. I mean, tariffs have been around for quite a while, and we moved a lot of the production outside of China. We use our Q1 shipments, it was about 19% of the U.S. product that had come from China. Even that's a little bit higher than what it really would be. There was a whole bunch of exemptions that were going to happen in Q3, they're going to end in Q2. It would all be planned before this to move a bunch of that out. With all of the other efforts, we think it's going to be down in the mid-single digits by the end of the year. A lot of progress already made on that.
The other thing is when they exempted semiconductors and certain electronics from the reciprocal tariffs, a lot of the products we make and sell actually fall into those exemptions. There has not been any tariffs. We have had a tremendous amount of internal planning of where we can move production to. We have buffered a little bit of inventory. There has been a lot of supply chain news and consumer angst maybe around it. The immediate impact on us, other than a few products which now have 10% that had nothing before, has been relatively small. We are waiting to see what all these final tariff numbers are for Southeast Asia, and we are waiting to see what they are going to do about semiconductors and electronics because they did say they are going to do something. They just have not announced it.
When we know that all these plans we've been doing, we can figure out which ones to execute on. I think most companies have been saying the same thing. It's not the tariffs themselves. It's the uncertainty around where they actually are going to be and what the final amount is going to be is what causes the extra management angst and attention.
Yeah. Do you feel like, I mean, in terms of competitively, that you're relatively in a better position than some of your major competitors as far as where you source your product from?
We believe that in terms of getting out of China, we're better than a bunch of our competitors. That is helpful. What the Southeast Asia tariffs end up being, we do not know. Everybody has moved to different places in Southeast Asia. We will have to see when it all shakes out. Today, I think, one, we are in good shape, just where physically we are beginning stuff from. Number two, the fact that we went through this process and we are going through the process for the remaining products that were in China anyways puts us in a much better position than a lot of our competitors, which maybe have not planned this out. Finally, most of our products are made via ODMs. We do not have factories full of equipment that we need to worry about. We made this big investment, and moving it is extra painful.
For us, it's more of finding a partner. Most of our partners have locations in various places. We could probably shift within the same group of people we work with and just change the physical location where it'd be. Where it's going to be, I don't know yet because nobody really knows how that's going to all play out.
Definitely. You mentioned the uncertainty. I mean, there has been some increased anxiety about macro conditions in general. From what we can see sort of across entertainment, the sort of consumer confidence issues seem to be impacting some types of businesses more than others. What's been your experience over the last couple of months, and how resilient do you think your business is generally to macro volatility?
The key thing for us is that we're in the launch phase of the GPU cycle. In Q1, NVIDIA started actually releasing into the market their new GPUs. With all the macro noise aside, there is a good tailwind for us right now, just in the fact that a lot of people are very excited about the new GPUs, and they want to build new PCs with it. That has given us a tailwind in and of itself. We've also noted over the years, when people feel there might be a recession or economic uncertainty, maybe they don't take a trip to Bali and they stay home. If they stay home, they spend more time in front of their PC gaming. In the peripheral side of our business, it's much more of an impulse purchase level.
It's not like it's not as much of a financial commitment to building a brand new PC. There are people that are spending time playing games because they're not going to Bali. Gaming is an important part of who they are and how they identify themselves. They're still likely to buy a new keyboard, mouse, or headset, or some new streaming gear, or a nice new Stream Deck or something. We believe that you're not immune to the economic cycles, but you certainly have a little bit of protection compared to some other industries.
I wanted to ask, the company is about to have a change in leadership. Thi La, who has been at Corsair since 2010, will be taking over as CEO from founder Andy Paul, effective July 1. You've worked with Ms. La for a long time. Can you talk a bit about what she brings to the table and how things might change or might not change under her leadership?
Internally, everybody knows T. quite well. I mean, she's been the number two person with Andy, but really it's been almost two number ones for a long time. Most of the functions in the company have reported to T. for quite a while. All of the success that I just talked about, you can see that T. has been behind a lot of the things that have been happening there. Internally, she's well known, well respected. Everybody thinks it's OK. Everybody assumed that whenever Andy decides to spend more time on cars and golfing simulators or whatever, the thing is that T. would take over. That's it. Obviously, she's different than Andy. I think that she's got a little bit more emphasis on customization. Customization of products is one of our strengths.
The ability to customize the whole setup that you have, I think, is something T. is very interested in. I think maybe a little bit more emphasis on AI as well, a little bit of integration of AI into our products and into the customer experience of putting together our products. Some of the internal processes, which like any larger company, we've been looking at how we can use AI to make things better internally. I think she'll push on that as well. Other than that, I guess we'll all see whatever other changes she wants to make. It is definitely something well known within the company that has been running big parts of the company forever anyways.
Does customization really relate at all to your sort of direct-to-consumer initiatives too, which I know is something that has been something you've tried to put forward?
This kind of came from our acquisitions of Origin and SCUF. They both had the capability of printing custom graphics on the outside of their products. We noticed a lot of our consumers, and particularly, like I said, as the demographics go younger and people seem to identify more strongly with their hobbies, people that identify as being gamers, they want something that makes it their product, like their gear that they're using. They're very likely to want a different color or a completely different graphic scheme. That is part of what we have. We have the Corsair Custom Labs, which we took the capability that SCUF and Origin had, and we spread it out more broadly to Corsair products. That is part of the thing.
The rest of it is just the ability to go and build your own sort of like digital workspace and then visualize how it looks in your room. Furniture companies and such have had this for a while. How would this sofa look in your room? You could take a picture of your living room, and it will show you how your sofa looks there. We can really extend that technology, enhance it with AI, and then have a real visualization of how your desk would look with all of our gear all put together and what color schemes. That will help the customer experience in terms of choosing something that is really personal that they will like. That is sort of some of the things we are doing there.
You mentioned earlier the GPU cycle. Obviously, that's a really important factor for the business, given the centrality of new GPUs to people wanting to self-build their own PCs. Talk a bit about how long those cycles generally last, what it means for your business, and how it's been going so far for you.
I mean, in general, on the component side of our business, the GPU cycle is a big driver of building a new machine. It's sort of like when a new GPU has just come out, it's a reason to really look at what the state of the art is. People that build their own gaming PCs tend to be PC enthusiasts. On top of everything, I mean, people discount the fact that AI certainly has an impact on that. Anybody that has a high-end GPU in their PC has an AI machine as well, by definition. So that's another thing that people will spec in. It's a reason for people to go and build a new gaming PC, and that spurs extra revenue. I mean, that's sort of what happens. I think this launch has been very typical, other than the fact it was delayed.
Usually, they launch at the end of Q3, and then stuff starts showing up in Q4 and really starts showing. Usually, by Q1, the lower-end series, the 60, comes out. The 60 series for NVIDIA was just released in Computex. That is now out. They did a more rapid release of the 90, 80, 70 than they normally do. Like always, it only came out in March. Q1 did not really see a big impact of that. Like always, demand way exceeded supply for the high-end, and everybody screams about paper launch and all the other social media noise you hear. They have gone all the way down to the 60. The 60 is the higher volume one. For us, this looks like a typical GPU launch.
The specs are better than the previous generation by enough to make people definitely want to have a new PC. AMD has very capable GPUs sort of in the mid to high-end of the range as well, not as competitive at the very top with NVIDIA, but quite good as well. The new CPU that NVIDIA just came out with has also been super well regarded in the gaming community. There are a lot of reasons for our customers to want to upgrade their system and build new systems now. In terms of that, we're quite happy with how that's playing out. The products are great. The products we designed to go with it, it's very complementary. We put a lot of effort because it's a very technical sale compared to a more impulse marketing sale for a peripheral.
If you go to our website, or even if you do a general search, we have a pretty strong AI engine, actually, that you can ask questions to about what's the best power supply in order to match with this GPU that I want to get or the setup. It'll go through which is the best match and why and what your buying journey should be. It'll take into account what budget and such you want to spend. We've really made the information for somebody to use to make a purchase much more accessible. This is something where the build-your-own-computer market, that customer base has been at the heart of Corsair for a long time. We really try our very best to make sure they're well served. We put in extra effort in the last year to get that all ready.
I think that's helping us.
In Q1, you had your highest gross margins in the gaming components and systems segment in two years, both on the memory side and on the component side, which was a really nice lift. Can you talk about what the drivers were there? I'm assuming it's probably related at least somewhat to the GPU cycle and how sustainable that might be throughout the year.
We were making a big effort. As we've talked about, and we've actually demonstrated our results. To lift our overall margins. Q1 is sort of like we had a sweet spot of a lot of the things we worked on, and all happened at the same time. Some of this has been in the works for a couple of years. We're trying to design products that are just better. They have the right features at the right cost for the features. We're not marketing to people for things they can't really use. That helps. Promotional environment was a lot less severe in Q1. More demand, higher ASP products. Higher-end GPUs need higher-end products to go with it. ASPs are higher. We're very competitive and pretty much the only choice in many cases at that level of spending.
Memory, again, sort of like an extra demand, I think, in the background, because AI machines need more memory. New games need 32 gig instead of 16 gig. People are really getting into having 32 or more gig of memory in their machines. That sort of demand helped stabilize the pricing for memory and moved it up as well. Q1 has also tended to be less promotional than Q4, particularly for peripherals. That always helps.
OK. On the peripheral side, you talked about that being more of an impulse buy. You'd had really strong double-digit growth throughout 2024, including your biggest Q4, I think, since 2021, basically pandemic era. Things slowed down a bit in Q1. Can you talk about what the drivers were there and kind of how you expect that business to trend as the year goes on and maybe factor in there how some game launches might or might not impact that?
Yeah. Our Q1 actually was quite good. We grew year- over- year, albeit that was with Fanatec added into the mix. Our Q1 last year was pretty strong. Our Q4 last year was also very strong. Our Q1, in comparison, was pretty decent, actually. Sometimes when you have a really strong Q4, people spend a little bit more money on peripherals in Q4, and they do not spend quite as much in Q1. That is relatively normal. The fact that we maintained the high level we got from the prior Q1 was quite good for us. It is a nice base to launch off of. Fanatec added to the mix is going to be quite good. I mean, the first revenue was in Q4 of last year. That will help us during the year.
We've done M&A as a way to grow for quite a while and then move into spaces we're not into. Racing sim is a very interesting market. We believe it's about a $1 billion-plus TAM a year. A couple of years ago, Fanatec was doing about EUR 100 million of revenue a year. So they had somewhere around 10% of that market. Motorsports is very popular and growing. F1, in particular, is quite popular. We believe that that's going to be even more wind behind us for this year as well. Quite comfortable and happy with the position of our peripherals products. Hoping as the year goes out, we got a bunch of, as always, we have great new products coming out in that space. Elgato's product for the broadcasting area is quite interesting.
They even have a virtual Stream Deck that if you didn't want the physical hardware, you want to try it, there's now a way to use it, coupled with other Corsair gear or Elgato gear on your screen itself if you want to try it. The growth and interest in Stream Deck continues to go as well. That's another good help for us on the peripheral side.
You mentioned Fanatec a couple of times. A billion dollar market is nothing to sneeze at. I know before you acquired them, part of the reason they were available is because they were having some difficulties operating the business. Do you think that's an area where, with your management, they can grow that share significantly? Maybe was it a supply issue that kept them at 10% or something like that?
It's kind of both supply and their emphasis on only direct-to-consumer and their inability to really focus on that. I do believe that under Corsair's umbrella, they're going to be in a much better position to grow. So the products were very good and well regarded. The people are extremely good. So the people that came over, they're technically great racing sim people who really understand the market and believe and love in it. We're glad that we got that whole team that came over with it as well. The operations of the business itself, obviously, they ran into basically, eyes got too big for whatever you want to say. They spent more than they were capable of absorbing. They hit just a small bump, actually, in their business. Because they had too much debt, it quickly took them into financial problems.
Part of us, it's not an issue anymore. We had to put a lot of extra time into customer service. They had not invested or done a good job of helping customers that bought their products. That was reflected in consumer satisfaction scores and complaints. I swear Andy was personally checking forms and checking tickets and pushing people. We did training. We brought them onto our system. There was a lot of effort put to stabilizing that. The second part is, obviously, their supply chain had not been paid for a while. When suppliers do not get paid, they are not huge suppliers. It was very painful for them. We had to step in and stabilize them and make sure they understood that they were going to get paid. We made up for some of the past sins that had happened and such.
That looks like it's pretty stable right now. Now we need to grow it and have the ability to expand and grow the business off of it. They're in our own systems now. They're pretty much all inside Corsair's system. That part of the integration has passed. We have a pretty good marketing plan for their products going beyond just direct-to-consumer, working with a lot of value-added retailers, like people that go in and build a whole racing sim rig for a hotel or an event center or for high-end consumers that want somebody to come in and do it, and a little bit into the consumer channel, into the general retail channel as well. Certainly, we're reaching out into parts of the market that Fanatec never serviced before.
Because we can, because Corsair has all those capabilities and relationships, it is easy for us to do that. We certainly are quite hopeful about how much that is going to help us in the next couple of years.
Is there an upgrade cycle for that market, too? What does it look like?
There's always a desire to have a different steering wheel. I'm not a car guy. Now, if my best friend was here who races for a hobby, he could tell you a million different things about it. Andy actually could, because he's a car guy. I drive a very boring car. I'm not really an F1 racing guy so much. I know that just looking at the pictures, and I also go on the forums and try to educate myself about the customer base, it's very common for somebody to have two or three wheels on a wall behind their rig. They'll switch out the wheel for the different feel and the look. There is always innovation in the base, which gives a lot of the force feedback as well, and the pedals and the gears and everything.
The chassis that we released just released, we designed it internally, branded as Fanatec, and came out. It really makes the experience very, very fun. You can even add, and this is something we do not make, but actuators that shake the whole rig. There are a lot of different things you can do. I mean, we have one of those rigs in our office as well. The look on people's faces the first time you run into a wall because you are not good at driving, and the whole rig shakes around you, it is quite an immersive experience for that. I will not say anything other than someone like me is more likely to run into a wall. Maybe I personally experienced that.
Let's step back and talk about the overall market structure of the company. Before the pandemic, you'd historically been sort of a mid-single digit. You've been a down-margin company. You did get up into the 10% plus range when we had this big boom. You've sort of settled back into mid-single digits. What's the outlook for getting back towards that 10% level? What's sort of the combination of things that need to happen for you to be able to achieve that?
Yeah. The easiest way to get up into the low double-digit margins again is the EBITDA margins. It's quite simple. Grow revenue and not grow expenses. We have a platform that allows us to do more revenue without adding a lot of expenses. Now, if we grow in peripherals, there's more marketing involved. There will be some growth in marketing. The base engine that we have can support more revenue. Grow the higher margin revenue in terms of peripherals faster than components is the other part of the formula. You do both of those together. You can raise that EBITDA margin pretty easily. That's actually one of the least hard things we have in terms of our management slate in front of us. It's essentially just execute and hit our plans to grow overall revenue and control our expenses. Most of that happens.
Design our products so that they're well costed for the features that are inside of it so that they can handle the normal discounting cycle that you have when you're selling through the channels we do. You're always going to have Q4 discounts on peripherals. Make sure your product can absorb those extra discounts and deliver pretty reasonable margins still. I think all of those combined, we should be able to lift those, again, more and more over the next couple of years. Like you mentioned earlier, we've had great performance and gross margins. Our revenue has stabilized and started to grow again. I think financially, the company is in pretty good position. Our debt is low. I mean, net debt is very, very tiny right now. Any time we're not spending on M&A, I've chipped away at the remaining debt from the LBO days.
We have a lot less of there. The company is financially strong. We have a little bit of a buffer of inventory because of the tariff situation to help us get through. We're quickly going to have the situation if we keep executing that our cash balance is going to get stronger. We'll either have to find more M&A to grow off of because there will not be much more debt to pay off. We'll have to find other uses of the cash as well, which is a great problem to have. I think we've done a lot of work behind the scenes in the last few years. COVID up and down and all the noise about it aside, we've positioned ourselves really well. Lastly, there are always great games to come out.
I get asked all the time, particularly by new investors, about games and what it means. Games are like movies. Some years, there are four or five great movies everybody talks about. Some years, there is one. It is the same thing for games. A couple of years, every once in a while, there is a game, like 2023, because of COVID push-outs. The first half of the year, it just seemed to have one smash hit game after another that came out. You hit a dry patch where there is not something. Anything that puts people in front of their PCs for longer means we get more sales. If you use your mouse and you do not like your mouse, it is not that expensive to buy a new mouse. You buy a new mouse. If you market well, Corsair will be the one you buy.
We're hopeful that the game release slate will continue to be decent. There'll be more reason for people to spend more time. We'll do well there.
I think we're about out of time. So, Michael, thank you very much for being here today.
Thanks, Doug.
Thanks, everyone, for being here.