Corsair has grown leaps and bounds in the two and half decades since it was founded, and if things go to plan, the company will soon become a publicly traded company. The gaming peripheral maker filed a $100 million initial public offering (IPO) as an “emerging growth company.”
An IPO would cap off Corsair’s ascension from primarily a memory maker in the 1990s to one of the biggest players in the PC gaming peripheral space. Corsair now sells a wide variety of PC gaming hardware, including cases and cooling products, power supplies, storage drives, keyboards, mice, streaming accessories, and even full blown gaming PCs.
Citing recent data from NPD Group, Corsair claims it has the top U.S. market share position in almost all of those categories. That’s not surprising—Corsair makes some of the best gaming keyboards and mice, among other products, while also staying true to its roots in high performance RAM.
Corsair has also made some key acquisitions over the past several years. It purchased boutique builder Origin PC and Scuf Gaming last year, and the year before that, it scooped up Elgato Gaming to bolster its presence in the streaming space. These purchases have left Corsair with some loans to pay back.
Having known all this, I was still surprised to see Corsair reveal it had raked in $1.3 billion over the past year, albeit netting it a profit of ‘just’ $31.3 million. Also interesting is a list of the companies Corsair considers to be its primary competitors in key market segments. Logitech came up the most, with Corsair listing it as a competitor in gaming keyboards and mice, gaming headsets and audio products, game streaming gear, and gaming controllers.
In the memory market where it all started for the Corsair, the company considers G.Skill, Kingston (HyperX), and Micron (Crucial) to be its main competitors. And in the prebuilt PC segment, it lists Dell (Alienware), HP (Omen), Asus, and Razer.
Corsair points out in its SEC filing that the global demand for PC gaming and streaming gear reached $36 billion in 2019, based on data from Jon Peddie Research. It also noted there was an estimated 524 million PC gamers last year. Out of those, around 94 million spent over $1,000 on their PC gaming systems in 2019, and 27 million spent over $1,800.
This is not the first time Corsair has considered going public. It had aspirations of doing so in 2012, under the same stock symbol, but announced in May of that year it was postponing those plans “due to weak equity market conditions.”
Thanks, TechPowerUp