Inside Asia Tech | From cult to mainstream: Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan on youth, authenticity and fintech
- Gaming company Razer reported a narrower loss in the first six months
- CEO Min-Liang Tan says Razer is a gateway to the lucrative youth market
What kind of a company is Razer, the Hong Kong-listed company that is headquartered in Singapore and San Francisco and helmed by co-founder and chief executive Min-Liang Tan?
I posed this question in different ways to Tan in a phone interview after the company released first-half results. If he was irritated at the question, he didn’t show it. After explaining the business model and several iterations of “ecosystem” later, Tan more or less settled on: “We’re a youth and millennial brand.”
That answer is telling because he did not say Razer is a maker of gaming hardware even though the company derived 85 per cent of its total revenue from selling laptops, mice, headphones and other devices for playing games. Three years ago, that percentage was 99.5 per cent.
Today, Razer derives about 15 per cent of its revenue from software and services. Services revenue has grown fast, albeit from a low base, to US$35.7 million in the first half, including its Razer Gold virtual credits and fledgling fintech business, and contributes about 20 per cent of the group’s gross profit.
The company has 70 million registered user accounts, an increase of 40 per cent from a year earlier. These are mostly young people, and a big proportion of these users in emerging markets are unbanked or underbanked – industry jargon for kids without credit cards or bank accounts.
