Corsair has grown dramatically in the two and a half decades since its founding and will soon become a publicly traded company if all goes according to plan. The gaming peripheral manufacturer has filed for a $100 million initial public offering (IPO) as an "emerging growth company."

The IPO marks Corsair's rise from being primarily a memory manufacturer in the 1990s to one of the largest players in the PC gaming peripherals space; Corsair now offers cases, cooling products, power supplies, storage drives, keyboards, mice, and streaming accessories, It also sells a wide variety of PC gaming hardware, including full-fledged gaming PCs.

Citing recent data from the NPD Group, Corsair claims to have the top U.S. market share position in almost all of these categories. This is not surprising; Corsair makes some of the best gaming keyboards and mice among other products, while staying true to its roots in high-performance RAM.

Corsair has also made several significant acquisitions over the past few years. Last year it acquired boutique builders Origin PC and Scuf Gaming, and the year before that it acquired Elgato Gaming to increase its presence in the streaming space. With these purchases, Corsair has had to pay off several loans.

Even though we knew all this, we were surprised to learn that Corsair revealed that it had raked in $1.3 billion over the last year. Also interesting is the list of companies that Corsair considers to be major competitors in key market segments; Logitech is most frequently mentioned, while Corsair has gaming keyboards and mice, gaming headsets and audio products, and game streaming gear, gaming controllers are listed as competitors.

In the memory market, where it all started for Corsair, the company considers G.Skill, Kingston (HyperX), and Micron (Crucial) its main competitors. In the pre-built PC segment, the company also cites Dell (Alienware), HP (Omen), Asus, and Razer.

In its SEC filing, Corsair noted that global demand for PC gaming and streaming gear reached $36 billion in 2019, based on data from Jon Peddie Research. He also noted that there were an estimated 524 million PC gamers last year. Of those, about 94 million spent more than $1,000 on PC gaming systems in 2019, and 27 million spent more than $1,800.

This is not the first time Corsair has considered going public. The company had been seeking to go public under the same stock symbol in 2012, but announced in May of that year that it was postponing that plan "due to the downturn in the stock market."

TechPowerUp