Corsair Gaming, Inc. (CRSR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining Tim Long, Barclays IT hardware and comm equipment analyst. Happy to have the management team of Corsair with us here today. So we got Thi La, CEO; and Gordon Mattingly, CFO. Happy to have them both here. I know there's a lot going on in the world.

So maybe, Thi, if we start with you, pretty new to the CEO role, too still. So talk a little bit about kind of strategic vision and kind of lessons learned so far in key focus areas.

Yes. So my vision for the company is to evolve Corsair and now house of brands from a premium hardware company into an enthusiast lifestyle platform that supports gaming, streaming, content creation SIM sports and also productivity and we are looking at building out an ecosystem -- connected ecosystem based on hardware, software and services for consumer to have a great experience. One example is if you look at the Elgato product road map, you can actually use a very smart control device cost stream deck. And from there, you can control 4K video source as well as very high-quality audio mixing and also smart lighting. And so an individual can create a professional broadcast studio from their home with our solution.

Okay. Great. And what are kind of the priorities to help you get towards this kind of evolution of the company.

Yes. So a number of priorities, 3 precisely for us. So short term is margin acceleration. And in that, we are definitely improving or optimizing product mix leaning towards more high margin, high-value product family. Second one is being really disciplined around OpEx leveraging our AI platform that we built internally to scale. And the third one is to grow our direct-to-consumer business model further. And this is going to be the top priorities for our new CFO, Gordon as well, and he will speak more to that later. The second priority is to scale up our revenue platform. Today, we are already making great progress with recurrent revenue through the Elgato product suite as well as the Elgato marketplace. And we see great potential in really growing this to be a meaningful part of our P&L in the future. So this is where we are investing our money. And the next thing is the Fanatec product suite we are adding services such as sim coaching to help you drive better and it's getting really good reception from the market. And the third piece is really investing in our direct e-commerce platform to add additional capability for personalization and customization, and that would then give us the opportunity to deliver even more options to consumers. The last one is just expanding further on our core business, then this is basically the components business as well as the gaming peripheral business. The TAM is pretty large. And for us to grow, it's just accelerating innovation and product cadence so that we can deliver faster products to the market and gain market shares. And recent Circana data is showing that we are gaining market share. So we're happy with the progress there. We are also investing in underserved channel like Asia and Latin America and year-on-year growth so far has been very promising.

Okay. Great. Maybe last on this topic, then we'll get to Gordon a little bit. How do you view M&A fitting in? And you have a lot of -- strategic directions are going on here? How do you incorporate M&A or build versus buy and investment? Like how do you see that calculus working?

The M&A strategy has always been an integral part of our business in terms of growth strategy. And we will continue to evaluate opportunities that give us channel acquisition, either consumer or B2B and brands that are complementary from a product standpoint to brand value. And as you may know that we as a company in terms of M&A performance, we've been doing a decent job in terms of realizing great value for us and for the acquired brands when we acquired a company. A recent example is Fanatec where we are seeing great acceleration in terms of synergy and the results so far has been over our expectation.

Okay. Great. So Gordon, I guess you've been CEO for a few days -- CFO for a few days now. So you know a lot. Talk to us a little bit about kind of what drove you to Corsair and a little bit of your background that you think helps transitioning to this company?

Yes, sure. I mean first and foremost, I'm really excited to partner with Thi and really to execute the strategic vision that Thi just outlined over the next few years. That's first and foremost. Funny enough, Corsair is a company that I knew from quite a while back. First thing was some of my finance team at a previous company left me to go to Corsair. So I was aware of the name and then I looked into it more and obviously became familiar with the brand strength, the innovation engine, just great, great products. And then coming in, doing my research and going through the process, there's just so much momentum and so much opportunity in the company for incremental growth and profit, whether it's GPU, PC refresh cycles, new gaming titles so much what Thi already talked about, Elgato momentum, the Fanatec integration, expansion of direct to consumer, both now online and through our own actual store. And then longer term, super excited about potential consumer SaaS recurring revenue opportunities. And my background where I had nearly 20 years of experience, NETGEAR and Arlo I think, really helped particularly having overseen a business model transition from hardware to consumer SaaS, I think, really helps me really to position Corsair as a higher multiple cash-generating business. And as I come in, my kind of top priorities are first and foremost, looking to drive more predictable growth, margin expansion as Thi already mentioned, continuing with disciplined capital allocation and then really focusing on greater transparency for investors.

Okay. Great. Yes, it seems there's a lot of different vectors here you've got to execute on. So have you developed a plan yet or are you still figuring it out?

Yes. I mean if I look across 3 areas of profitability, working capital management, capital allocation, as I look at profitability, the focus, as Thi already mentioned, is to look at margin expansion. There's definitely lots of opportunities there. Margin expansion while continuing to manage OpEx super efficiently. And with that, we should see EBITDA expansion. That's the first thing. Obviously, on working capital, continuing to manage that with a disciplined approach we have done in the past to maximize cash and obviously, to be able to execute on strategic opportunities as they present themselves. That's super important. We've done a great job in recent quarters of paying down our loan. I expect that to continue. And on capital allocation, we're going to continue to invest opportunistically, obviously, looking to maximize returns and long-term shareholder growth.

Okay. Great. Maybe touching on the Q4 outlook, which is probably just a little bit on the conservative side. A lot of moving parts with consumer spending plus memory and chipsets. And so maybe walk us through the near-term dynamics that are influencing the demand environment. And then as we work through that, what does the curve look like?

Yes. It's definitely a very interesting year for me coming into this position as the new CEO. First, we got this entire tariff situation coming in, in Q2. And now with semiconductor signaling shortages for GPUs and DRAM or just memory in general, is creating such a high pressure for the entire market. But I do see that Corsair is going to be in a better space or in a better place than most others and the reason for that is we've been in this business for over 30 years, making high-performance memory modules. Our manufacturing capability and our engineering capability is vast and we're also very fast. So in a market where memory price is searching to unprecedented level, we're able to turn our road map to introduce more affordable products to consumer within the course of few weeks so this is something that we do very well. But beyond this, though, we have other product segments that do not depend on memories to grow, for example, Elgato streaming product as well as the Corsair gaming peripherals and Fanatec driving -- sim driving accessories, all these are growing nicely with or without memory. I do see the opportunity that is more of the share of wallet. So if people cannot spend as much money in building PC or buying PC then that budget is going to go into accessories or accessorizing your gaming setup or sim setup. So for us, I mean this is -- it's a balance between short-term issues, but can turn into great opportunities for Corsair as well.

Okay. And what are you seeing on the consumer behavior side? It's kind of all over the board lately for most -- playing in this world.

Yes. I mean last week, it was more like shock and sponge. So everyone is concerned and thinking that because of AI expansion in the data center, the chipmakers are a bit deserting the consumer space. But I think that things are going to settle down. And Corsair, as the enthusiast consumer brands would take it upon us to really help to ease the pain by making solutions more available to consumers. We have deep relationship with chipmakers because of the 30 years in the business. And the problem that we see right now is it's going to go away. It's not going to be around forever, but the consumer business is healthy and will be around forever. So we strongly believe that chipmakers will support Corsair with allocation to support this space.

Okay. And in tougher macro times, how do you view like promotional activity and in tight demand environments or supply environments, how do you view inventory maybe for both of you. Takes a little bit different type of management.

Yes, absolutely. So from a pricing promotion standpoint, it's a very interesting dynamic because of the tariff situation. So a lot of people are not seeing as much of a discount this year when it comes to Black Friday, Cyber Monday. In terms of memory, of course, given the products allocations are so tight. So you're not going to see that much pricing promotion. Corsair have taken a position in memory inventory when we announced our Q3 earnings, just to make sure that we are positioning ourselves to support future demands for a number of months out.

Okay. Great. And I guess you got -- Gordon, you got a balance inventory with the cash flow and capital return.

Yes. I mean we do a really good job of working capital management. And actually, that stands in really good stead to what Thi was just talking about for us to be able to opportunistically look at memory and make sure we've got a good inventory position there. The track record we have of really efficient working capital management helps us to be opportunistic there.

I wanted to add that we are very focused on sells out as a key metric. So we often, if not weekly review the ins and outs of our inventory to make sure that we're not overinflating channel inventory, especially with recent shortages, there might be some people wanting to get a little bit more inventory for themselves and we work really hard to control that.

Okay. And those numbers, the sell-out data has been...

Very balanced, yes.

Okay. Good. Maybe just talk about some of the growth drivers. Can you talk a little bit about gaming and peripheral upgrade cycles as it relates to new gaming titles, it seems there's a steady flow, but how do we think about that correlation? And what should we be watching?

Yes, the way we look at gaming titles is, first of all, the publishers always will be working with NVIDIA, for example, in AMD or Intel to make sure that the game titles are taking advantage of the latest game engine in terms of video rendering site to deliver that mesmerizing image quality and because the games are so compelling, it is a very popular game, people would want to upgrade their graphics engine to run the game and that would tie to more power meaning power supply and more cooling meaning water cooling from us for example and then on the gaming peripheral side, we continue to improve technology, so you can game faster, more accurate. And if you are competitive gamers and you would want to upgrade your gaming devices. And the second part of it is gaming platforms such as the Nintendo Switch 2 or new PlayStation, new Xbox will drive a slew of content release, and that would drive streaming demand in terms of new content, and that would pull a lot of video capture sales for example from Elgato as well as all of the rest of the streaming part where that we're selling today.

Okay. And you mentioned the GPU cycles, what do you normally see for like duration and impact of upgrades to GPU quality?

So historically, gaming or GPUs, I would say, releases about every 2 years. So NVIDIA would have new products usually around Q1 or Q4 every other year. And with that during the first year of product releases, we will see double-digit growth for components and systems. And then the next year would settle down to the single digit and then the cycle will repeat itself. Now with data center demand being very high, we haven't seen any change from NVIDIA direction, but we would expect that, that cycle will not change.

Okay. Great. And then I think you mentioned briefly Fanatec and sim racing. Can you talk about kind of opportunities and where we are in the curve for some of those?

Yes. So the sim racing category is about a $1 billion TAM in 2024, and it was growing double-digit or even triple digit before that every year. And this year, we also see the same exciting momentum. So the opportunity for us is road map expansion and we are going to be releasing a lot of exciting products in '26 and beyond. We are also investing in product engineering resource to really push that. And then we can extend that investment into new category like farm sims as well as flight sim to increase the TAM.

Okay. Great. Maybe one I think you mentioned once or twice, AI in here, we're at a tech conference so we got to talk AI. Maybe talk a little bit about kind of how you're viewing it internally at Corsair. And how does the product road map and the transition that's going on, how does the broader industry move towards more AI play into those dynamics at Corsair?

Yes. AI for us is near and dear. I mean we see it from 2 different perspectives. So internally, we have a lot of AI capability at this point that we built out to support our business growth. Externally, we are seeing the adoption or I would say, the explosive adoptions of AI in terms of application and use cases that requires people to have a much more powerful machine for either machine learning or building out their own personal LLM model. And the reason why you want it to be personal because of concerns around security and IP protection. People are concerned now in terms of putting their invention on the cloud so they wanted to have their edge computing, local edge computing and we see this as an advantage for us to enter the space with a solution like the AI workstation that we recently released is compact and extremely powerful. And in a market where supply is very tight. It opens the window for Corsair to enter into a channel that we don't quite participate today.

Okay. Excellent. I did want to go back to something we were talking about at the beginning kind of this transition from a hardware based company to more lifestyle company. Maybe for both can chime in. What does that take from a -- whether it's R&D or sales, marketing, go to market? Like what has to change on the investment and expertise standpoint at Corsair to make this transition work?

You wanted to take that first and then I would pick up from there.

Yes. I mean from my experience, it's a mindset shift. It's a mindset shift across the company. And really is driving that and thinking about it every single day. And instead of it being a hardware first company, we need to start thinking about how can we actually leverage our advantage and think about recurring revenue models and how can we push that internally. I think that, and I think it's experimentation, things you're not always quite sure how things are going to play out. But I think running probes and seeing how those probes work out super, super important. So there's got to be a kind of thought process around experimentation with it. But I think it's just reiterating that message being super focused on it as a team and then just continuing to stay the course. And it takes a while. It's a bit like an oil tanker, but long term, the benefits are pretty impactful.

So for us, like Gordon said, it takes that dedication and consistencies and investments. But if you look at how we transition from a premium hardware company to a lifestyle enthusiast platforms, in a way, I look at it more from a catalog shopping to more of a use case shopping. And part of that is how do we communicate that use case so it involved a website migration to really deliver that message. It involves retail strategy in terms of how we show up in-store to sell the solution. For example, right now, we just opened up the very first Corsair experience store in Valley Fair, and that's the Westfield mall in Santa Clara. And if you go into the store, you will see that the entire Corsair product suite come together as the platform very nicely. And we are extremely pleased because the engagement with consumers is extreme high and also the traffic has been tremendous. So we're watching the investment very closely for future expansion. The other thing is consumer shopping is changing and it's beneficial to us. So if you look at the traditional way of shopping, you go on Amazon and you say, "I'm looking for a keyboard, for example, that can do X, Y, Z, but now you go to ChatGPT and you said, "Hey, I'm interested in being the best gamer for Call of Duty, what are you recommending in terms of solution for me and those are solutions shopping or platform shopping that we are definitely already delivering today, and we're going to leverage that engine to incorporate this capability, what we call the prompt capability into our e-commerce platform to really push that further.

Okay. Great. Maybe just 1 last one here. This whole transition to more recurring models. Are there parts of the portfolio where that's more low-hanging fruit and easier to do. And are there some that are going to be a bigger lift. Maybe if you can kind of walk us through some of the buckets that's easier to get -- accomplish that.

Yes, absolutely. The Elgato marketplace, for example, we are already interacting with over 2 million active users and are generating recurring revenue and now it's just a matter of taking that and investing capability and resources to grow the content on the platform and grow partnership on the platforms so that we can reach more audience and scaling that up. We really think that this is one of the most obvious opportunity for Corsair to grow recurrent revenue. And other solutions that we are working on in terms of AI workstation, they're all vertical solution with machine learning, LLM models that we are working with partners to deliver everything in 1 box to consumers. And then there is SaaS strategy to tie with that road map.

Okay. Yes, I think we're coming up on time. Anyway, thank you both for the time today, and thank you, everybody, for joining.

Yes. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Appreciate it.