Hanging in there
For all this talk of diversification, Corsair remains best known for memory. We asked McGuire how that market is looking these days. "The price of DDR2 has gone down very low," he said. "I mean we're below cost levels for most of it and you've got companies like Micron haemorrhaging money.
"What does all that mean for us? It means the memory business is still going to be a big proportion of the business but we don't want it to dominate. Looking back a couple of years we were looking at memory modules costing $60-70 and today we're talking in the $20 range and that's not comfortable at all.
"With the challenges faced by everyone during this recession, I'm grateful we did diversify into power supplies. And we've really grabbed an enormous market share, going from nowhere to probably the top three in the world in high-end branded market. In certain markets, like the US, we've already gained number one status."
To conclude, we spoke about the state of the global economy in general, and how it's currently affecting business. "If someone saves themselves a couple of grand by not having a holiday in Hawaii this year, they might spend £500 upgrading some of their technology because they expect to be spending more time at home. We're seeing evidence of people not buying big-ticket items but are spoiling themselves in smaller ways," said McGuire.
"In the general economy, we've seen a little bit of a pick-up. We saw a very strong July and we think that should lead to a strong fall and we hope that will carry over into Christmas. But on the whole, most people are just hanging in there and would love to just forget about 2009 and move on to 2010, in the hope that it will be better."
We don't think many people will disagree with that sentiment.
