Good afternoon, and welcome to Corsair Gaming's Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded, and your participation implies consent to such recording. [Operator Instructions] With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Ronald van Veen, Corsair's Vice President of Finance and Investor Relations. Thank you, sir. Please begin.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Corsair's financial results conference call for the third quarter ended September 30, 2024. On the call today, we have Corsair's CEO, Andy Paul; and CFO, Michael Potter. Andy will review highlights from the quarter. Michael will then review the financials and our outlook. We will then have time for any questions. Before we begin, allow me to provide a disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements. This call, including the Q&A portion of the call, may include forward-looking statements related to the expected future results of our company and are therefore forward-looking statements. Our actual results may differ materially from our projections due to a number of risks and uncertainties. The risks and uncertainties that forward-looking statements are subject to are described in our earnings release and other SEC filings. Note that until our 10-Q has been filed, these numbers are preliminary. Today's remarks will also include references to non-GAAP financial measures. Additional information, including reconciliation between non-GAAP financial information to the GAAP financial information is provided in the press release we issued after the market closed today. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Andy.

Thanks, Ron. In starting this earnings call, I'd like to say that I've rarely been so excited for Corsair's future as I am right now. Our business depends on four fundamental premises. First, the desire and ability of consumers, mostly gamers and creators to build high-performance gaming PCs and buy peripherals in order to play the latest games or optimize their studio setup. Second, our ability to continuously bring compelling products to the market. Third, our industry partnerships with other parts of the gaming ecosystem, both from hardware manufacturers and game publishers. And lastly, our ability to have partnerships with retail channels who, for most of our brands are where we sell our products. With those things in mind, let's get into some of the details, and then you'll see why I'm so excited. Let's start with the ecosystem. I think we all know that for any sport or pastime, the base platform is very important. Lots of snow brings out skiers, sunshine brings out golfers, mountain bikers and runners and great games engage gamers. For the last two years, consumers have not seen many blockbuster games launching, but the recent Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 launch in October was an overwhelming hit. Roughly two-thirds of our business relies on people building high-end gaming PCs in order to play the latest games at high frame rates. To build such a gaming PC, you need a high-performance CPU from Intel or AMD and a high-performance GPU from NVIDIA or AMD, those in the form of graphics cards from their board partners. The GPU is generally of most importance to gamers. And normally, the graphics cards containing these processors are refreshed every two years. This year, however, that cycle extended to 2.5 years. Latest industry speculation is that NVIDIA will launch…

Thanks, Andy, and good afternoon, everyone. This quarter was typical as it started slowly during the traditional vacation months of July and August and then accelerated in September. Our gaming and streaming business continued to grow year-over-year with strong margins, but we continue to see a shift towards lower end of our components product offerings as our end customers deferred building higher-end systems. These products tend to have lower margins, which impacted Q3 results. We took cost savings actions during the quarter, and we'll continue to be prudent in our spending plans so we can drive improved profitability while investing in areas that will drive our long-term growth. In terms of the specifics, Q3 2024 net revenue was $304.2 million compared to $363.2 million in Q3 2023. For the first 9 months of 2024, net revenue was $902.8 million from $1 billion in the year ago period. European markets contributed 38.4% of our Q3 2024 revenues compared to 33% in Q2 2024, while the APAC region was 10.3% of our Q3 2024 revenues compared to 10.9% in Q2 2024. Turning now to our segments; the Gamer and Creator Peripheral segment contributed $102 million of net revenue during the third quarter compared to $90.4 million in Q3 2023. For the first 9 months of 2024, Gamer and Creator Peripheral segment revenue was $303.2 million compared to $258.1 million for the first 9 months of 2023. The Gaming Components and Systems segment contributed $202.2 million of net revenue during the third quarter from $272.8 million in Q3 2023. Memory products contributed $97 million in Q3 2024 compared to $131.7 million in Q3 2023. For the first 9 months of 2024, Gaming Components and Systems segment revenue decreased to $599.6 million from $784.5 million in the first 9 months of 2023, with revenue…

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from George Wang of Barclays.

I have two quick ones. Just firstly, can you kind of double-click on EBITDA margin improvement plan? Just curious, any particular levers you guys might be targeting near-term in terms of the path of returning to high single-digit EBITDA margin? Just kind of any sort of measures you can give more color on just in terms of profitability going forward?

Well, George, there's a couple of things, right? We've got a big year coming up for us with game launches and technology launches. That will drive sales of higher margin, higher ASP products. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that we're continuing to grow our Peripheral business, and we expect that to continue next year. Now our Peripheral business, as you know, is much higher 40% gross margin product lines compared to our much lower margin memory and components. That has continued to grow over the years. In fact, we are now for this year, making more gross margin from our Peripherals group than our Components and Memory. And we actually -- even with the rebound of the Memory and Components group next year, we expect that to continue. So that is the biggest leverage because that mix will drive our overall margin up. Do you want to make any comments on some costs and things?

The only other thing is just we've already covered our operating expenses at the lower revenue level this year. So as our revenue goes up and we generate more total gross profit dollars more of that will fall to the bottom line as well.

Okay, great. Just a quick follow-up, if I can. Just maybe we kind of take a step back maybe you can talk about just general consumer demand versus the three months ago. Just any notable changes? And also kind of as it relates to GPU refresh kind of early next year, just additional data point we could be looking out for kind of in the interim. Just any kind of high-level thoughts on the industry trends there.

Well, I think there’s a couple of things to talk about. One is short-term, one is long-term. So short-term, you probably heard from Amazon, they announced record Prime Day. We also had record Prime Day, and I think we were the leader in the gaming space in terms of growth. So what does that mean? We saw leading up to Prime Day, resale data that was slightly under last year immediately popped above in Prime, and we’re seeing that continue to go up. Now I think what that means is that shoppers are there and they want to buy gaming gear. They’re a little bit more price conscious, and that’s what you’d expect in an inflationary environment. But as that eases, I think people are now getting more able to shop. And I think we also saw, as I mentioned in my notes that since Prime Day, the retail channel has been very much more confident. And so we’re seeing really good bookings as they get ready for the holiday season and for Q1. So I think the whole retail channel in general is feeling good about consumer sentiment. The other thing I'd say at a much more macro level is that we are now 4.5 years from lockdown. And so we’re over the historical refresh periods. And I’m pretty sure that we’re going to see a lot of refreshes going on where now people have peripherals and graphics cards that are just too old to keep up with current requirements.

Our next question comes from Aaron Lee from Macquarie.

With regard to your updated guidance, can you unpack for us how much of the change was related to your third quarter performance versus a change in expectations for fourth quarter? And on the latter, what are the major drivers of that change just given some of your comments around the solid bookings activity from October?

Yeah. Most of it was a Q3 shortfall. We exited, as you saw for Q2 at a pretty slow pace, and that continued in July and August. So it really wasn't until September that it started picking up, and there wasn't enough to pull the quarter up to the level we had expected so most of it comes from Q3. There may be a little bit of conservatism in the Q4 numbers because we left Q3 a little lower than we wanted. So there is a little bit of effect in Q4, but most of it is from the Q3 shortfall. Most of the shortfall was in gross margin percentage in the components and systems. So even with revenue not too far off of what we were expecting after a decent September, it was in lower margin and lower cost components, and that brought the total margin dollars down.

Got you.

Aaron, let me add one thought to that. I also think in Q3, we had two pieces of information come in. One was the NVIDIA launch, which everyone was expecting was going to be at the end of the year, suddenly realized that it's probably more likely going to be Q1. And so I think that caused the channel to be a bit apprehensive. We also saw generally in the middle of the year, the retailers being a bit wary of inventory. And so that has started to flip in Q4. I think people are a lot more confident. So that means distributors and retailers buying a little less inventory than planned in Q2 and a little more towards the end of Q3 and Q4 -- sorry, Q3 to Q4, yeah. Does that make sense?

Understood. Yeah, that makes sense. As a quick follow-up, I wanted to talk about your Stream Deck. Can you just update us on the Stream Deck marketplace and where the trends there have been like? And what are your expectations around the marketplace becoming a more material revenue stream in 2025?

So the marketplace has well over 1 million accounts now, growing very fast. That’s the first thing. We historically have used the marketplace as a free app marketplace. We started about a year ago to allow third parties to charge, but mostly, it’s free. So the download numbers are absolutely enormous, but mostly free. We have got two thoughts here. One is that the number of free downloads actually drives Stream Deck hardware revenue. And so we’ve actually seen since we launched the marketplace, a good growth in Stream Deck units sold. And then the second thought is that at some point, we’ll be able to start charging for very compelling apps as well. So I think at the moment, we’re still in the very early stages where the revenue from software sales is fairly insignificant, but it’s certainly driving growth in hardware sales.

Our next question comes from Andrew Crum from Stifel.

I think you suggested 2025 would be a rebound year for the components and memory businesses with the anticipation of the new GPU serving as a catalyst. 2023 was the last year that featured the launch of new chips, and it really helped segment performance. Is '23 the type of sales threshold we should anticipate for the segment when looking ahead to next year? Just trying to understand the magnitude of a recovery we should look for next year? And then I have a follow-up.

Well, that's a billion-dollar question, right? Here's the way I would think about it. What's different is that '23 was still very early after COVID. So we have to realize now we've got our backward-looking glasses on that there was a lot of pull forward in COVID years. In other words, a lot of people built gaming PCs and bought peripherals in '20 and '21 that then caused them not to do that in '21 or '22 or '23. So imagine you've got a certain amount of the market pulled for one or two years. So in '22, obviously, there was a massive over inventory and demand went down because people had already bought and built everything. There was still some of that hanging over in '23. So while the early adopters were growing new cards, a big chunk of the market had already built machines. We typically see about an average of two cycles for people to upgrade. So in other words, people with 40 Series cards were upgrading 20 Series cards. And we'd expect in the 50 Series cards launched next year, people to upgrade the 30 series. So that's why we think now that the COVID -- or let's say, the ripples from the COVID surge are kind of over and we should see more steady growth now from here on out.

Got it. That's helpful. And then, Andy, can you comment on your channel inventory heading into the holidays? I think you mentioned healthier booking trends that you're seeing across your ecosystem and then the dynamics with retailers maybe less willing to take on more stock back in 2Q, but more willing to get a little more aggressive heading into 4Q. Where are you positioned going into the holidays?

Well, we’re still in the middle of the rebound. I’d say if you look at the middle of the year, we were under inventory compared to our plans, which obviously means that our sell-out was a little higher than our sell-in. And that’s now starting to reverse. So I think all the retailers have now realized that it’s time to lean in and everyone is getting signals that it’s going to be a strong Christmas, especially after the Prime Day activity.

Now the other thing for us to remember is that, as I said earlier, we’re now getting more gross margin out of our Peripherals group than our Memory and Components group. And we do expect on a macro level that the peripherals market, firstly, grows faster. It’s much less prone to economic issues because spending $100 or $200 on a peripheral is much easier than building a $2,000 or $3,000 PC. And the overall market in general is growing faster because there’s more gamers that are coming into the market that are teenagers that can afford to buy a peripheral than can build a very expensive gaming PC. So we expect that market to continue to grow, and we continue to grow within that both organically as well as with acquisition. And our plans – we’re not planning to do all these acquisitions that we’ve done already and then stop. What we’re finding is there’s a lot of companies around with revenues in this $50 million to $100 million level, which really have a tough time getting traction in the market because there’s billion-dollar players there. So there’s a lot of opportunities we have for acquisition, and we’re planning to continue to do them. And where we focus is high gross margin, mostly direct-to-consumer, and that will just continue to add to our gross margin of that division. So expect the Peripheral segment to grow faster in general than components in Memory, even though the Components and Memory Group should have a healthy rebound next year.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Colin Sebastian from Baird.

This is Colin Milliet [ph] on for Colin Sebastian. So just beyond waiting for the broader product refresh cycle for chips and PC builds, what gives you confidence in the underlying demand within the industry? And then second question, you guys did the mobile controller as well as the racing simulation this year kind of as a key focus. So is there any more details on product development pipeline for 2025 and then any specific categories that are going to be in focus?

Well, we’re trying to focus on everything at the same time, right? But look, starting with Sim Racing, that’s a big market with very few players in it, mostly small. The only big player really is Logitech. Then there’s a lot of enthusiast companies. We bought the biggest one, biggest enthusiast player. One of the things that we realize is that there’s a big market there for complete systems, and that’s right now being serviced by a lot of very small integrators. And we’re going to hope to really add to that because remember, we make monitors, we make gaming PCs, we make chassis. So we make the whole solution. And this is very different from the industry as it was before. So I think we’re going to make a big impact there, and we’re all very excited about that. The other parts of the business, I mean, the Stream Deck and the Elgato portfolio is very powerful. We just launched into a new B2B business where we’re hitting up all the professional broadcast booths. A lot of them have been experimenting with Stream Deck and so we actually made a Stream Deck especially for them when we've launched that at some of the broadcast shows and tremendously popular. So I think that's an additional part of the business that's going to grow. And then lastly, our overall Peripheral section or segment, which makes the traditional peripherals, gaming headsets, keyboards and mice is really doing very well. We've got a magnificent portfolio of new products that have just arrived. Some of those we mentioned are going to be taken up by the Apple Store. But I think we're really hitting that market in full force now, getting the right products out at the right time.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Andy Paul for any closing remarks.

Thank you, everyone, for joining us on the call today and for continued support. If you have any follow-up questions, please contact our Investor Relations department. We look forward to updating you next quarter. Thank you, and have a good evening.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.