Gaming companies aren’t really frequent on the IPO list. But off late, gaming has found newer avenues of growth, helping companies in the sector becoming bigger and better. One such company silently making money and at scale, is Corsair Gaming. And to add to their years of success in the PC hardware industry and in a bid to attract more capital, Corsair, a popular gaming PCs and peripherals company has finally filed to go public with an initial public offering (IPO) of $100 million. The shares of the company will be traded on NASDAQ under the symbol CRSR.
To give an insight into the company to potential investors, the paperwork of their IPO highlights the company’s history, its competitive position, their plans for future and their financial report as well. It claims to be the top seller in gaming keyboards, power supplies, high performance computer memory, cases and coolers, as well as the runner up in performance controllers and streaming gear.
Corsair had been bearing losses for past couple of years, $13.7 million in 2018 and $8.4 million in 2019. However, it seems like the coronavirus pandemic emerged as the company’s saviour, pushing it to register $1.3 billion in revenue with a profit of $31.3 million in the last year. The company claims that this was a result of their exceptional performance during the 12 months ending in June 2020, justifying a $100 million IPO. All and more was revealed by The Verge, based on the IPO filing that the publication extracted.
Most of this revenue came from the company’s most popular business of selling RAM modules, with sales of $429 million. More work from home meant more laptops/PCs, which meant more RAM. Corsair’s growth has largely reflected the overall hardware industry growth during COVID-19 as well. The growth in revenue was also helped by its increasing portfolio and numerous strategic acquisitions in recent years such as SCUF gaming, Origin computers and Elgato gaming.
In fact, the gaming hardware company goes on to mention that COVID-19 pandemic was a huge reason for such huge gains, saying that the increased demand is due to the “shelter-in-place requirements caused by COVID-19.”
It addresses mobile gaming, cloud gaming and augmented and virtual reality as its risk factors. Corsair does not have any plans to develop gaming gear for mobile devices, AR or VR and believes that cloud gaming would reduce the demand for their gaming PC and console products.
Corsair made its entry in the PC industry by selling memory or RAM, and then expanded into peripherals, cooling hardware, power supplies and most recently streaming hardware. Its main rival and competitor is Razer, an industry giant in itself. Corsair’s decision to file for IPO is in footsteps of Razer’s, when it filed to go public in 2017.
