Oh, I see it now.
Okay, thank you very much, everyone, for joining us. We're very happy to have with us Corsair, and from Corsair, we have CEO Thi La and Michael Potter, who is CFO. I'm Colin Sebastian. I follow Internet, digital media, interactive entertainment at Baird. We're going to begin with a few slides, I believe, and then we'll turn to Q&A. For those of you in the room, if you see the email address in front of you, feel free to drop an email for a question, which I'll receive up here and ask anonymously on your behalf, if you'd like. Otherwise, I have a list of questions that I can ask the team as well. T, why don't I kick it off to you, and we can go through some slides you have.
Thank you, Colin. I just want to thank everyone for being here today, listening to us. Thank you, Colin and the Baird team, for allowing us this opportunity to present. Just to get started, a little bit about me. My name is Thi La, and I am going to be the CEO of Corsair starting from July 1st of this year. I've been with the company now for 12 years and really working on scaling up the business, delivering a solid business operation, and also a diversified roadmap. With Andy Paul, who is our retiring CEO, we were working on a lot of M&A opportunity and also looking at integration, where I'm deeply involved with. I have a technical background, so my passion is really into making fantastic products that resonate with our consumers.
In terms of our company, we've been around for 30-plus years now, and we have a very rich product portfolio that continues to evolve. As you know, the consumers are evolving, and the tech are evolving. The fact that we are around for this long is because we are very nimble in terms of adapting to the market. We now have a rich product portfolio, including gaming, streaming solutions, as well as DIY components and performance PC. With the most recent additions of sim racing with the acquisition of Fanatec. How we differentiated ourselves is we consider us as a house of enthusiast brands, as you can see here, with six performance brands. We have a pretty extensive ecosystem that's backed up by hardware, software, and service solutions that just work seamlessly together. Our strength is really in terms of the brand, right?
We are trusted by the enthusiast community for delivering fantastic performance and quality. We have deep community ties that have been with us for a long time. We engage with them actively through just making great products and the influencer network that we have now, up to probably 6,000-8,000 active people talking about our products globally. We recently added a number of executives to drive our business. Each category is basically driven by product experts as well as P&L experts. This is a big change for us comparing to a few years back, where we were growing very rapidly. Before COVID, the revenue was about $900 million going to $1.9 billion in a very short amount of time. This change creates a big stress in terms of organization and resource.
At this point, we're very happy to report that we're fully staffed and ready to charge. In terms of the market we're in, I think you probably are well aware that gaming is a pretty big market. Now we have over 3 billion gamers, right, and growing each year. They are using gaming as a social platform. The younger generation tends to game more. The creator economy now has about 200 million people actively streaming and monetizing. Elgato is basically the favorite brand for this community. In terms of DIY, the market is a stable market, right? About $3 billion of TAM for where we play. It's steadily growing. Sim racing is a new category for us. We're excited because with Fanatec, we can participate in about $1 billion of market TAM. This is a double-digit growth each year.
On top of that, the younger generation likes personalization and customization. This is a capability that we are building up for. The strategic opportunity for us right now is to basically take advantage of the latest momentum in terms of the gaming publishers are releasing a lot more titles starting from this year forward on to 2026 with titles like GTA 6. This has been long in coming after COVID, right? We feel like the momentum is here now. We also see that there is a shift in Gen Z starting to play more games on desktop versus console. The reason why is that a lot of publishers are starting to open up gaming or popular titles to desktop now, starting from Xbox Game Pass. Recent reports from Capcom, for example, are saying that their desktop gaming revenue is now 60% of their business.
This is actually really good for us. The other opportunity for us is really stepping up our direct-to-consumer business, right? It's an important category as we wanted to engage directly more with consumers and drive more margin for the business. Last but not least, global expansion is another big category for us because we underserved in the Asia market. We are stepping up the investment in Asia just to kind of balance out the three regions. With that said, I wanted to say that with all of the capability that we built up to this point and with me stepping into the company as the new CEO, we have a strong platform to build on. I'm ready to accelerate our company and give the company a good momentum to grow into the next number of years. Thank you.
Thanks a lot, Thi. That was great. Congratulations on the role. This is your first investor conference sitting on stage. I really appreciate that opportunity. I think some of the faces you recognize or the team recognizes, some are new. I think given the transition, it might be useful in the context of what you presented around the outlook, the growth opportunities. Strategically, does your vision or is the company's roadmap going to change? Is it going to be different than what maybe we heard in the past from Andy?
I think that is a good question. People ask also, why me versus someone else? What is it that I bring into the game that's different than an external candidate, for example? My answer is always the same. We have a pretty strong foundation to build on. I am very familiar with how we came to where we are today. I also think that we're ready for a new chapter. My vision is really to be able to accelerate the company and drive growth consistently, as well as applying a strong discipline on margin. Where I think we want to focus on is three things. The first thing is expanding our footprint in terms of market share and products. That's where we're going to be stepping up product innovation.
With the executive team that we now staffed out, we will be able to increase the cadence of new product introduction. That will really help accelerate our revenue. The second thing that we wanted to kind of focus on is the direct-to-consumer business and the consumer engagement. As we see the consumer shifting over to more agentic AI shopping behavior, meaning you used to go look for things like I'm looking for a keyboard or a mouse or whatever technology you're looking for. Going forward, you'll be like, I need to do these certain tasks. I'm looking for a keyboard that looks like this and can do these things. A lot of it is going to be done through maybe ChatGPT or something like that. Our e-commerce platform definitely needs to be evolving in order to support that trend.
A lot of our investment will be moving into that direction. This also gives us an opportunity to engage with the consumer at a different level. Third, it's going to really improve our margin stack by working and converting consumer directly versus going through our traditional channel. The third thing is basically scaling up and expanding our categories. For example, we just acquired Fanatec. This product line and this brand is highly desirable by the channel. Everyone is super excited to have the opportunity to distribute Fanatec products globally. The first thing for us to do is channel expansion for new categories. The second thing is, as mentioned before, stepping up Asia investment so that we can actually leverage a margin, sorry, a region that is really growing quite a bit recently in terms of gaming.
The first point you made on product innovation and accelerating that, I mean, from my standpoint, Corsair has a lot of new product every year. It's almost hard to keep up with it all. What does that mean in terms of acceleration? And how quickly does that happen?
Yes. I think that we have a total of like 25, 26 product lines at this point. While we are very strong in certain categories like power supply or DRAM or streaming product line, not every single one of them is carrying the same cadence as we should versus the market. The innovation behind them is not consistent across every single product line. The point right here is with the new level of executives that we brought in, we're going to be able to drive that consistency across every single product line. The next thing is the ecosystem integration. If you look at right now, each brand sort of stands on its own.
The important part is for us to develop tech stack that we can actually leverage across the entire product lines and basically create a value for consumers that makes everything work seamlessly together. There will be investment in terms of ecosystem that you will see coming from us, starting from simple things like we take a gaming mouse and then we integrate the Stream Deck, the virtual Stream Deck technology. What you can do with this product is you can experience a level of use case that never have done before, right? Gamers and creators, everyone gave us extremely good feedback after Computex in terms of this is something that solved a lot of their use case that they truly appreciate. We wanted to do more of this, right?
OK. I'm going to come back to Computex in a second.
Yes.
Michael, T. also talked about margins. There is always a balance between investment and margins. Maybe if you could address two elements of margins. One is just what we see more recently, for example, on the gross margin side. When there is an effort to drive more product innovation, but also expand margins, how do you plan for that? How does that play out over time?
Yeah. Part of the reason why our total margins are better is because our gamer and creator peripheral segment has grown faster. That is higher margin, so it drops more margin into the consolidated number. Structurally, in the background, we've worked very hard in our product design to design our products to be more resilient to the normal discounting cycle and to deliver the features that are wanted at the right cost. We're able to actually make better money today than we were in the past by very carefully designing the product upfront. That has made a pretty big difference for us. Innovation, obviously, you have to invest in R&D and somewhat in marketing to get the word out for it. New products tend to have better margins when they first come out as well.
The more often you refresh your product mix and get new products out in front of the consumers, the better you're able to support that higher margin. We've done a better job in the last couple of years of doing that. You can see the results in the record margins we had in our gamer and creator peripheral segment. The last thing is, as Thi. mentioned, we're doing more to D2C. There is a higher margin if you don't have a channel margin in between you and the customer. That's also helped lift our margins up somewhat.
Yeah. I also wanted to add to that is we wanted our gaming and creator segment to be the majority of the contribution for the business because that's the category that we're generating about 40% plus gross margin. While the DIY system and memory segment of the business is more like the 20%-30%. As we continue to expand our investment into gaming and creators, that's going to really help the margin.
Let's talk about what's happening near-term then on that front. I mean, clearly, the diversification in the business is a very positive move. These are also cyclical businesses to a degree. The demand and the supply for gaming GPUs is a big topic right now. You guys had a really good start to the year. The business is tied to some extent to that cycle. Maybe talk about how you think over the remaining months of the year that dynamic will play out with the GPUs, with supplies, and then what you're seeing on the demand side.
Yes. For this year, we actually feel like it's the beginning of another very good upgrade cycle for consumers for a number of reasons. The first one is, of course, with NVIDIA 5000 series launch, it triggers consumer upgrades in terms of higher wattage power supply, larger capacity memories, and so on and so forth. What's also interesting this year is AMD is coming into play with their own GPU lineup of the 9000 series. It delivers actually really good gaming performance at a reasonable price. This particular situation has not happened in a long time. We feel like there's a little bit of a less dependencies on just NVIDIA cadence.
The third thing is if you look at when everyone is upgrading their system, and they're going to feel like the need to actually upgrade the rest of the hardware, like gaming peripherals as well as gaming streaming devices. The gaming market, as mentioned early on, we see the momentum is picking up because if you look at the game release calendars from now until the rest of the year and way into 2026, there are so much more compelling titles. On that side, we see that is happening. Between the momentum of the DIY upgrade cycle, AMD coming into play, and gaming market momentum is picking up because of game releases, that's something that we see is going to last us for I think it would feel like we're going to go back to pre-COVID where that cadence is more consistent.
How does that downstream impact on the peripheral side of the business work? I mean, you sell more systems, memory at the front end of the cycle. And then over time, there's a margin and mix benefit as it hits the other side.
Yeah. We saw that naturally when someone upgrades their PC, there is a desire to upgrade the rest of the connected device, I would say. The younger generation tend to like to personalize, customize, and make everything look good. If you look at the picture that we show here, right, five years ago, it is a pretty plain desktop. We actually do not have many products to participate in that ecosystem. Fast forward to now, you will see that a lot of our young consumers wanted to build an entire desktop that is just matching the personality so they can express themselves. This is where they spend most of their time. Back to the early conversation on a lot of console players are moving into desktop. One of the reasons is this as well.
We are at the center of customization as well as the desktop experience with all of the connected devices. Naturally, you wanted to make sure that everything works well together and matches well together.
Yeah. It looks great. I need to get.
This is the Lord of the Rings series. It is actually one of the popular designs and preferred designs by our community.
There are a couple of obligatory topics. Michael, I almost hate to bring up tariffs. I am actually curious. I mean, you have quantified, I believe, this already. As you sort of review that for the audience, given that you have already moved production, and I think strategically you are pretty well aligned with this, does it actually ultimately become an advantage if your competition has to raise prices? I guess there are two parts to that question, the tariff impact and then potentially how that flows through from a competitive standpoint.
Yeah. When we reported Q1, we said about 19% of our US market is served by China-based production. And that was just projecting what it was in that quarter. Actually, by the end of the year, it's going to be easily into the single digits. We're already planning to move a bunch of the other stuff out anyways before the latest tariffs came in. We manufacture across Southeast Asia as well. We would be impacted depending on which country it happens to be. Most of our planning is actually, what are the different scenarios we have to use depending on where the tariffs ultimately end up in? Of course, as everybody knows, there were super high tariffs announced in the beginning and then suddenly scaled down and then an exemption for semiconductor and electronics, which applies to most of the products we make.
The actual tariffs we've been paying are much smaller than the initial shock numbers that were announced. It is not impacting us so directly right now. There are a few products that were subject to the 10% reciprocal tariff, but that is a little bit easier to deal with than the higher amounts. We are dealing with it. I think we are in quite a good position. We do not actually make a lot of things ourselves, and even our own factories are very CapEx light. If we had to move location, we are not abandoning a factory we have made a big capital investment in. I believe looking at the numbers that our competition has put out, we are actually better positioned than they are in locations and the way we do it to have much lower tariffs. That should help us. Pricing-wise, pricing is based on features and demand.
You hope you get your cost right. As long as our features are really great and the demand is good, I think we'll be OK on the pricing front as well, particularly since we so far have sidestepped most of the impact of tariffs.
The channel is interesting as well. The other Andy, Andy Jassy, talks about Amazon not absorbing those costs. Suppliers will have to do that. Is that something that you perceive is accurate, that retailers will be able to avoid this to some degree?
I think with our business so far, the relationship with our channel partners is a constructive one. We discussed what is the right things to do for the consumer. We shared the responsibility in terms of pricing promotion. What's important is really trying to balance between sales velocity as well as the pricing strategy. We have been pretty supported by our channel partners in terms of where we need to go. As Michael mentioned, the impact for us is not significant. The conversation tends to be a lot easier.
Yeah. No doubt. Turning to something a little more fun.
Yes.
Let's talk about Computex because I know you were there, right?
Yes, I was.
Did you see Jensen there? Or was he around?
I see him from afar. And he's a very popular man nowadays with lots of followers.
Could you maybe talk about what you saw there from the Corsair product suite that you're most excited about and what we should be looking at and thinking about for the product rollout?
Absolutely. This is actually one of the most exciting Computex for us in a long time. One of the reasons is that it is the most product releases that we've ever done in our history. We have a full suite of DIY gaming products that got so many recognition in terms of innovations and best of show awards. On the gaming side, actually, what is even more exciting is when we launched the Scimitar Gaming Mouse and the Xeneon Companion display combining with the Elgato Virtual Stream Deck. As I mentioned before, this solution is also well recognized and appreciated by the community. There were already a ton of YouTube videos talking about how amazing the use case is for the streamers and gamers.
The last one is we sat down with our channel partners and shared our Fanatec distribution plan for the second half in terms of expansion. Everyone was giving us basically a standing ovation for making the brand and the product available because they know the brand is well up. The second thing is the market is growing very quickly.
All right. Good stuff. Look forward to seeing more of that. I'd like to ask either one of you, I guess, around capital allocation. I mean, you've made some interesting acquisitions. You have the balance sheet, obviously. What are the priorities with capital allocation now and how you see that kind of playing out? Are there obvious pieces in the portfolio that you feel like need to be filled?
Yes. For us right now, we just finished a couple of acquisitions that we're going to basically leverage that and drive forward. In terms of M&A opportunity for us, it's really looking at different verticals, for example. Elgato, as a product roadmap, just released the Studio Stream Deck. This solution is well loved by the major studios around the world, for example, conversation with people like Amazon Studios, Netflix, and things like that to use our solution. We are more a consumer company. We do not have a dedicated sales force for broadcasting industry, for example. It is not unreasonable for us to consider something that makes sense there. The second thing is, as we continue to scale up our gaming and creative segment, anything that we can bolt on that benefits EBITDA as well as revenue with good synergy, we would not say no to.
Hopefully that answered your questions.
Yeah. So turn to the audience. Any questions before I ask another obligatory question? Feel free to shout it out. I'll repeat it for the audience. OK. Second obligatory question, AI, big theme, obviously, at the conference. Curious for a company like Corsair.
Yes.
Internally, how you're using AI, generative AI, tools, assistance, agents, if we can say that already at Corsair. Secondly, externally, whether it's product customization or other relationships with your community, what are the applications?
For us, AI internally, we already migrate our tech support solution over to AI. That really generates a big boost in CSAT score. We're also moving a lot of marketing capability over to AI, such as translation, content creation, and storyboarding at the start level, and then with people curating the content. In terms of engineering, we've rolled out AI capability for software development as well as validation, which allows us to cover a lot more point of cases and boost quality. From an external perspective, as mentioned early on, we built AI into products such as Stream Deck, such as the teleprompter display and our audio solution where it can just automatically detect your environment and tune the audio profile accordingly. We will continue to integrate more AI stack into our products going forward.
From an e-commerce standpoint, of course, I mentioned early on, it's something that we need to consider in terms of building out the next generation e-commerce platform.
Michael, does this help margins when you are cutting costs with customer support and other internal operations?
I mean, it helps EBITDA margin, obviously, because most of that's not built into our cost of goods sold. Yeah, it does help ultimately. What it really does is it drives further engagement with the company. When the customers are happy, I mean, if they have a problem and they need to contact customer support or a question, the better we serve them, the more likely they are to stay with us as a customer and keep that engagement going. It is very valuable not just to look purely at the cost savings you might get, which are some, but also how it really improves the customer experience. Like Thi La talked about earlier, if the buying experience is better and they can build what they want to buy, it makes them more likely to stick with us as well. That is important.
Yeah. I also wanted to add that from a scalability standpoint, for us to go from $1.5 billion to $2 billion to $3 billion, if we wanted to generate a lot more margin, we should not be hiring people endlessly. For example, for tech support, we were able to scale with not hiring anybody at all. That is really our strategy, to keep OpEx fairly flat while growing revenue.
Thi you mentioned the video game market a couple of times and GTA specifically. What did the push out of GTA mean for you guys, if anything?
Not a whole lot because we did not build it into our number to begin with, just because of the cadence of their announcement. We are excited because we think it is going to make a difference for us, especially things like Elgato product line. If you search like, how do you play GTA 6 on PC, the Elgato capture cards came up as the recommendation. This is back to how people search for stuff nowadays through agentic AI. We are glad that we have an engine to actually feed into that.
Excellent. Thank you both very much for being here. Appreciate the time. For anyone who'd like to follow up with the company or with me around Corsair, very happy to make that connection as well.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you, everyone, for listening.
Thank you.