Corsair Gaming at Goldman Sachs Conference: Strategic Expansion and Innovation

On Wednesday, 10 September 2025, Corsair Gaming (NASDAQ:CRSR) presented at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025. CEO Thi La and CFO Michael G. Potter highlighted the company’s strategic focus on product innovation, operational efficiency, and global expansion. While the company sees growth opportunities in emerging markets and new product categories, it also faces challenges such as managing tariffs and navigating macroeconomic uncertainties.

Key Takeaways

• Corsair is prioritizing accelerated product development and operational efficiency.
• The company is expanding into Asia and Latin America, targeting underpenetrated markets.
• New GPU launches and SIM racing market integration are driving significant growth.
• AI is a central focus for improving internal processes and enhancing product offerings.
• Corsair aims to strengthen its position in the creator economy through Elgato.

Financial Results

• GPU Launches Impact: The NVIDIA 5000 and AMD 9000 series contributed to a 30% growth in gaming components and systems in Q2.
• Market Growth: The SIM racing market, valued at $1 billion, is expanding at double-digit rates annually.
• Debt Reduction: Corsair’s debt has decreased significantly to $125 million, down from $550 million pre-IPO.
• Tariffs: The impact of tariffs was minimal in Q2, costing around $1 million.
• Market Share Gains: Corsair gained market share in the gaming peripherals market during Q2.

Operational Updates

• Product Cadence: Accelerating product development is a key priority for Corsair.
• Margin Improvement: The company is focusing on operational efficiency through AI and M&A synergies.
• Global Expansion: Efforts are underway to expand in Asia and Latin America.
• Fanatec Integration: The acquisition of Fanatec has been fully integrated into Corsair’s ecosystem.
• Supply Chain Diversification: Corsair is expanding its supply chain in Asia and Mexico to mitigate tariff risks.
• Direct-to-Consumer Expansion: Enhancing consumer engagement and improving margins through direct sales.

Future Outlook

• New Categories: Investments are being made in SIM equipment and AI workstations.
• Content Roadmap: Upcoming AAA titles like Grand Theft Auto VI are expected to boost hardware sales.
• Peripheral Market Strategy: Corsair aims to deliver more value in its product roadmap to maintain momentum.
• Creator Economy Expansion: The Elgato marketplace is being expanded to onboard more creators and enhance product use cases.
• M&A Strategy: Corsair is considering acquisitions that complement its current operations.
• Long-Term Vision: The company aims to be an innovative platform with a seamlessly integrated ecosystem.

Q&A Highlights

• GPU and Content Cycle: Corsair anticipates multi-quarter upgrade cycles from new GPU launches and content releases.
• Competitive Landscape: Differentiation through product integration and a platform approach is key.
• AI Strategy: AI is being implemented internally for efficiency and externally for product enhancements.
• Capital Allocation: Growth investments in product development, R&D, and M&A are prioritized.

For more detailed insights, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025:

Eric, Host: All right, I think in the interest of time, we’re going to get going on the next one. It’s my pleasure to host the team from Corsair Gaming. We’ve got Thi La, CEO, Michael G. Potter, CFO. Those are who are joining us here today. Corsair is one of the largest global providers and innovators of high-performance products for gamers, streamers, content creators, gaming PC builders, and SIM racing enthusiasts. Corsair has built a full ecosystem of products that work together to enable everyone from casual gamers to committed professionals to perform at their very best. The company’s portfolio brands include Fanatec, Elgato, SCUF Gaming, Drop, and ORIGIN PC. With that, let me turn the floor over to Thi for a brief introduction before jumping into the fireside questions. Thi, after you.

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: Right. Thank you, Eric, for having us here. Thank you, everyone, for joining me today as well as joining Michael today. I came into the position as CEO since July of this year. Before that, I was the COO as well as President for 15 years at Corsair Gaming. My background was from HP running P&L for gaming PC as well as monitor. That was a $3 billion business. Coming into Corsair Gaming, I was able to bring a lot of that experience to Corsair Gaming to help us grow. We are looking forward to be able to share more about our strategy through these Q&A sessions.

Eric, Host: Great. Thank you so much for that. I want to build on your background and how you ended up in the company. You’re now running the company as CEO. Talk a little bit about the key strategic priorities that you’ve set for yourself, that you think are the most important things you want to accomplish when framed against the market opportunity in front of you.

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: Yes. We see Corsair Gaming is at an inflection point at the moment. We built a very good foundation based on DIY components, pre-built PC, gaming devices, and creative solutions for streamers. Now we’re ready for the next chapter. For me, that would be three things. The first one is to accelerate product cadence, meaning bringing out impactful products to the consumers at a much faster rate. Number two is to unlock margin opportunities through operational efficiency, especially with AI capability. Also, really step in on M&A synergy. The last one is global expansion with a focus on the Asia market as well as Latin America, both of which are underserved at the moment. In parallel, we are also stepping up our direct-to-consumer business. By that, we can also increase our engagement with consumers as well as add to our margin portfolio.

The most exciting part for me is new categories. We are investing into SIM equipment and services around that. The second thing is getting into new categories such as AI workstation. Both of these are growth vectors for Corsair Gaming for a number of years to come.

Eric, Host: OK. I do want to build on that. You know, as a team, you’ve highlighted momentum around Fanatec and SIM racing products. Can you discuss the global rollout strategy? More importantly, Formula One is at an all-time high from a popularity standpoint across multiple media formats. How does that factor into the excitement about the potential for the market opportunity there?

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: Yes. You know, we are very pleased with the Fanatec acquisition. The receptions from channel partners as well as consumers were tremendous. We see SIM racing at a $1 billion market and growing at double digits every year. For us, Fanatec is now fully integrated into our ecosystem. Now we’re rolling out globally. The accelerations or the popularity of the Formula One recently, we see that as an accelerant, basically pulling the SIM driving category into mainstream. What that really means is it just really drove up adoption rates from the enthusiasts. Looking into the holiday season, we are preparing inventory. We are building out bundle strategy, building out partnerships for marketing, and also scaling our distribution channel, both from direct-to-consumer as well as just the channel partners to take advantage of what we consider as probably a very hot selling season for the categories.

Also, owning Fanatec gave us a position to go much deeper into SIM sports. By that, I mean, you know, golf SIM, flight SIMs, farm SIMs. All these are basically performance and spectator sports. We see this as the next growth categories for the enthusiasts for their pastime, right, for a number of years to come.

Eric, Host: OK. Interesting. Let’s turn quickly to NVIDIA and AMD GPU launches. There is a refresh/rebuild cycle that typically comes with GPU launches that’s tied to your components and systems business. Why don’t you talk a little bit about how those launches feed into demand for your products and what you guys are seeing in the market today?

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: Yes. The NVIDIA 5000 series GPU launch, as well as the AMD 9000 series launch, contributed to about 30% growth of gaming components and system segment in Q2 for us. We saw enthusiasts upgrading power supply, DRAM, cooling solution in order to take advantage of the advanced ray tracing technology, as well as AI 3D rendering. We are very excited about this trend because we forecasted the growth and it’s here. We look forward to seeing this momentum carry into the holiday season.

Eric, Host: Building on that, not only do technological advances typically build refresh cycles, there’s also cycles tied to content. We have a lot of AAA content coming across the gaming landscape, a lot of excitement building for Grand Theft Auto VI at some point, likely next year, along with a whole bunch of titles. How do you think about the content cycle away from just the technological cycle driving demand in the business?

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: Yes. In looking at publishers’ roadmap for Q4 and well into 2026, as you mentioned, with highly anticipated titles such as Grand Theft Auto VI, we are very excited because we have seen in the past exciting games drive sales for hardware. We do also see that this is a multi-upgrade cycle. The GPU would go first as a priority because that is a pretty significant investment, and then all of the components around the GPU to make sure you have the best performance PC. Enthusiasts will upgrade all of the input devices such as keyboard, mice, headset, streaming gear in order to complete that setup. This cycle is going to be over a number of quarters, and it’s going to go through the next couple of years. A new GPU will be launched again, and we’ll start the cycle again.

The good thing about GPU launches is that it would bring in new titles because typically both NVIDIA and AMD always work with publishers to make sure that they pull out the latest technology from the engine.

Eric, Host: You know, one of the questions I get a fair bit from investors, and I don’t know if there’s an answer to this today, is how might this cycle look different than prior cycles? You have a GPU cycle on top of a very heavy content cycle. Is there any historical context you can give there to not even think about it? Or is it just we know how the momentum builds and it’s wait and see how it comes through in the environment?

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: I think that there were some baseline data that we used to project the growth because NVIDIA has always been launching, you know, every two years. In this cycle, they were late. We see a bit of a delay in terms of that adoption. The interesting part this time around is you have AMD coming into play. Usually, it’s just NVIDIA and the GPU, right, the only GPU. Now you got NVIDIA and AMD. AMD is playing very well at that sweet spot, you know, the $799, $700 price band with a really good product. They have their own cycle. You will see that the cycle may change instead of every two years with two players, maybe every year, you know, you have something to buy into. The titles itself, historical data, the famous Fortnite driving, like massive amount of headset upgrade, right?

Eric, Host: Yeah.

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: We are looking at the roadmap and say, will Grand Theft Auto VI be driving the next Fortnite, you know, headset upgrade, for example?

Eric, Host: Yeah, it’s going to be we have some big forecasts for it. Who knows how that will all play out? I wouldn’t take the under on many of those forecasts, from what we could tell. I want to turn to the peripherals business. How would you characterize the competitive landscape right now in peripherals? How do you position yourself competitively to execute against what you see across that landscape?

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: In terms of if we look at the, you know, the standard gaming peripherals market, yes, it’s a very crowded market. There are many players. For us, we see ourselves as a little bit different than the crowd. Corsair has been around for more than 30 years, and the brand is well known for performance and quality. When we built out our gaming solution, we don’t just build, you know, a keyboard, mice, headset that can game very well. We also integrate other solutions such as the Elgato Stream Deck that delivers productivity as well as, you know, increasing the convenience of your workflow. You’re not just getting a gaming device, but you’re getting a well-rounded product. Let’s call it a platform to support your everyday usage. By delivering more value to our product roadmap, we see traction.

We gain market shares in Q2, and we will continue to, you know, follow this path to really gain traction and sustain the momentum.

Eric, Host: OK. One of the most interesting things over the last 12 to 18 months is you guys continue to diversify some of your channel strategy, how you go to market with your products. How should we think about the mix of go-to-market strategy for the company evolving in the years ahead?

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: The go-to-market strategy for us right now is if you look at global deployment, we are underserving in the Asia market, for example. This will be one of the key investments for us in terms of local influencers, local product line, and also channel partners, just to really take advantage of what we consider as a very healthy market but underpenetrated. You will see us already working with a lot of partners such as Call of Duty and the recent Battlefield announcement for the beta together with Elgato launch. These partnerships are going to be very important for us to continue to invest in.

Eric, Host: OK. Building on that, one of the themes that I think remains a little bit misunderstood from investors is there are elements of exposure you have to the creator economy, the type of equipment and the type of peripherals and the type of things that allow creators to build and scale what they do. Talk a little bit about your exposure to the creator economy, how that might evolve, how some of your product initiatives might be aligned with that economic engine going forward.

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: Yes. That is a very good question. The creator economy for us is about 250 million community exiting 2024. Elgato has a very high market share, especially with solutions like Stream Deck. You can imagine that we are the first company to deliver a single-person studio setup where you yourself can actually control lighting, microphone, videos, and interaction with your fan base with just a simple device. We like the space very much. The question is, how do you educate and onboard people a lot easier and expand our reach to get to more influencers or creators? We built out what we consider as the flywheel. The Elgato marketplace right now is providing plugins. It’s providing content. Because it is a marketplace, so many other makers can actually make content and add to the marketplace.

We have over 2,000 or more than thousands of downloadable contents, either paid or free, so that people can customize their setup exactly to the way they want. This flywheel is basically you download more content. The use case continues to expand. People will buy more hardware. The basket is very good in terms of margin and ASP for us.

Eric, Host: OK. Next, I wanted to turn to the tariff landscape. It has been one of the most dominant themes in the market environment this year, probably only outshone by AI to some degree. There is still a lot of uncertainty around tariffs, especially in the semiconductor landscape. How do you think about your relative exposure to that theme? How does it factor into the way you forecast the business going forward?

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: For us, tariffs continue to be fluid. The formula for us doesn’t change, though. We expand our Asia supply chain to make sure that we have presence in a number of East Asia countries from a supply chain standpoint. We also added Mexico to the mix. At this point, we feel like we’re ready to flex our supply chain with very little effort in order to basically tackle any situation that we are dealt with. The impact in Q2 is small, you know, a million something. For short term, yes, you know, we will see, you know, some small impact. Long term, it should not be an issue at all.

Eric, Host: OK. One of the other themes of this conference have been questions about the macro backdrop. There’s been a bit of a more volatile picture depending on which kind of consumer you’re looking at by income level and activity level. There’s been a wide range of messages over the first two or three days. When you think about what you’re seeing in terms of consumer demand trends, how would you characterize it by either geography or what people spend their money on or what you’re seeing in your broader array of products?

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: For us, we think that our customers, the enthusiast economy is fairly resilient because when you are investing in the hobby, it’s most likely that you don’t give up your hobby and do nothing because, you know, things get a little bit more expensive. What would happen if the macro economy is soft and maybe change, you know, the rate of the growth? Instead of double digits, it may be single digits, for example. The market itself is fairly stable. If you look at gamers, right, the number of gamers coming into the TAM every year is growing from Gen X, Gen Y, Gen Z. More and more people game every year. This is the data that is known to all of us. There are no issues with the TAM growing. The question is how fast, not like is it going the other way?

Eric, Host: Right.

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: Right.

Eric, Host: OK. I can tell you my 18-year-old son does everything he can to get more gaming money out of me. He’s being very resilient right now.

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: Yeah, the good trend that we also see is younger generations like to game on desktop versus console.

Eric, Host: Yeah.

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: This is good for us as well because we have very good market shares.

Eric, Host: No, not to get into too much anecdotal, but I would think they take a lot of pride in what they built on the desktop side, which I think dovetails very, very well with your business model.

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: Yeah, we’re happy to meet with your son.

Eric, Host: I can be dangerous for you.

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: All right.

Eric, Host: Happy to help, though. AI obviously has been the other dominant theme of this conference. One of the interesting angles is we’ve talked to a lot of CEOs and CFOs who’ve talked to us about how they’ve deployed AI internally in their companies. I think what’s come back to us is a general message of it’s driving a lot of efficiency.

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: Yeah.

Eric, Host: It’s allowing us to invest faster in growth.

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: Yeah.

Eric, Host: What has been your experience with deploying AI into your organization? What sort of pathway are you on there?

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: Yeah. AI for us is a very key initiative. From my standpoint, if we don’t make AI work for us smarter and more secure, then we will fall behind. Internally, we kicked off a number of programs already to drive AI to integrate into different business processes from supply chains, engineering, marketing, and tech support, for example. We launched our AI-driven tech support platforms about a year and a half ago. That added to efficiency and capacity that we never had before. The best part is the customer satisfaction went up 10% since then. This is a great success story that we’re using as a learning experience to build out a solution in the future for other parts of our business.

Externally for products, we are looking at AI as not just integrating AI for AI’s sake, but AI as a native solution to increase the experience or to make the experience more useful for consumers. We launched the ORIGIN PC AI workstation very recently and got very good reception. People like the fact that it’s a very small form factor machine that is so powerful. You can build your LLM models untethered. That means that everything you have can be completely secured. You don’t have to deal with potential hallucination because of, you know, maybe garbage data. For other products such as the Elgato smart teleprompter, you can actually use the prompter and it basically just follows your pace with you. You speak faster, it would go faster. You slow down, it automatically knows that. You stop, it will stop.

This is how we implement AI in a way that it is, you know, very easy to use, right?

Eric, Host: OK.

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: Yeah.

Eric, Host: Let me try to bring Michael into the conversation as well. We’ve talked a lot so far about growth initiatives, product, where we’re going from that standpoint. Bring it together for us in terms of the priorities around how to tie investments in the business back to margins, back to how capital is allocated inside the company.

Michael G. Potter, CFO, Corsair Gaming: I’ll be saying the same sort of thing about growth because that’s what we’ve been talking about so far. The first priority for us for deploying capital is growth.

Eric, Host: Yeah.

Michael G. Potter, CFO, Corsair Gaming: We’re going to have to deploy it internally for product development or R&D or to develop internal capability to deliver new great products. We can look at M&A. We’ve been successful in M&A in the past. A lot of the companies that you and Thi La were just talking about came into the Corsair Gaming family through M&A. We’ve been selective. We really try and get the products that enthusiasts really like and leaders in the field, somebody who’s very high quality that fits into the Corsair Gaming brand and the way we run the company. We’re ready to deploy more capital that way if there’s more opportunity.

Eric, Host: Yeah.

Michael G. Potter, CFO, Corsair Gaming: The second thing is obviously paying down debt. Now, it’s not as big a priority today as it’s been in the past. Before the IPO, we were about $550 million or more dollars worth of debt. Today, we’re about $125 million.

Eric, Host: Yeah.

Michael G. Potter, CFO, Corsair Gaming: That’s got extended very recently for five more years. There’s no near-term pressure to do anything. If we don’t have a great thing to spend on for growth in the short term and we have excess cash, we can always pay that down more. That’s in a very good position to be in there. Finally, we talked about tariff and all the different situations that are going on. It’s good to have a little bit of reserve and a stronger balance sheet because we have to be able to react and be able to weather small storms if something comes up. We’ve really tried to make sure that if we need to invest in a little bit of extra inventory because we’re moving from one location to another location to mitigate some tariffs, we can do that and it won’t disrupt our operations.

Eric, Host: OK.

Michael G. Potter, CFO, Corsair Gaming: We have been quite careful and very, very methodical in the way we’ve done it the last few years.

Eric, Host: Yeah. I don’t want to put either of you on the spot. It sounds like that’s a continuation of those priorities going forward. When you think about M&A, how do you think about what the decision process is around M&A? Not to say like what you would do, but what typically are the types of situations that would get in front of you where you have to make a decision about this would be an accelerant of our business?

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: Yeah.

Eric, Host: This would amplify what we’re trying to do just to better flesh out or inform some of the capital allocation decision behind M&A?

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: If you look at our strategy at the moment alongside creators, economy, and gaming, and SIM sports, anything along that line that brings margin contribution will be a great add to our business. Anything around AI technologies that helps those experiences will be a great add. It’s a combination of maybe smaller tech acquisition or maybe larger investment into a healthy business that is definitely complementary to what we’re doing, we are considering all of those.

Eric, Host: OK. I know we only have a few minutes left. I do want to look out over the longer term. I want to direct this to you. If Michael wants to come in, that’s fine as well. What are we talked we started with your priorities for the medium to long term.

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: Yeah.

Eric, Host: Bring it back to, you know, if we’re having this conversation in three, four, five years, which I hope you’re here in three, four, or five years, we’re having this conversation.

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: Yeah, I hope so too.

Eric, Host: What would we be looking back and saying were your biggest priorities to execute against, and how you’re aligning strategy against those priorities?

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: For us right now, looking forward, we need to really focus on products. Products meaning, you know, building out the entire experience for SIM equipment and also taking AI-native for a lot of the products that we’re working on right now and really push that forward very quickly. Two, three years from now, you will see us as, you know, being that innovative house with a great product family. We wanted to position us as not just that gaming company or that DIY company, but more a platform. The ecosystem of making everything working together well is very important because I’m giving you an example for you to get on a SIM racing rig. Not only are you driving with all of the SIM equipment, but you need a PC to drive that. You need keyboard, mice, and headset to control the experience.

For us to step in and sell that entire ecosystem and making it super easy to step in, sit down, and just work is a differentiator. The other thing is scaling our D2C business, but also thinking about AI as an opportunity to make that entire journey super fluid and building in customization, personalization, and creating that extra benefit for consumers to buy directly from us would be one of the key focuses. Global expansion is important because the way we think about the world, you’ve got America, Asia, and Europe. You can count all of the other continents. In general sense, we are concentrated in Europe, Western Europe, and North America in terms of revenue distribution with a smaller contribution from Asia and Latin America. If you think about us being able to open that up with good margin, the scale is pretty good.

Global expansion is another thing that we want to focus on.

Eric, Host: OK.

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: Yeah.

Eric, Host: A lot to execute against. We look forward to continuing to get updates from you.

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: Yes.

Eric, Host: Please join me in thanking Corsair Gaming for being part of the conference.

Thi La, CEO, Corsair Gaming: Thank you all. Bye. Appreciate it.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.