Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan revealed that all the company's products are sold at a loss.
When asked about its recently released left-handed gaming mouse, Tan admitted that it sells "terribly." But this is OK, he believes, since Razer is focused on gaming, not profit.
"We're not run like a real company, I know. It's insane, but every single product we ship, we're shipping at a loss. Life is short. And it's funny to see someone using a left-handed mouse," he explained. "I have great investors. They're passionate about what they do. I tend to be able to deflect any questions like 'how are we doing on a business level? How profitable are we?' by going 'Look at this! Isn't it cool?' And they go 'Oh yes, it's cool,' and then I agree. Yet another board meeting saved."
"Our investors are genuine product people. I'm thankful for it. I cannot imagine if somebody's just interested in like, a bottom line or a profit," he added. "We've been able to make decisions that make absolutely no commercial sense whatsoever. Even the laptop flies in the face of industry reports. You know, 'PCs are dying, everyone should get out of the PC industry' and here we are going 'Great! Let's invest as much money as we can in building a PC laptop.' Right? Doesn't make any sense but hey! Look at it! It's cool."
Tan is referring to "Razer Blade," the company's self-proclaimed world's thinnest gaming laptop. The laptop itself is pretty powerful but its cheapest model costs $1,999. According to Tan, the a significant sum of money was spent on R&D to make the Blade possible.
"For every finished product that goes to market, there are probably four finished products that we've done but not released," he noted. "It's one of those things, a Razer design initiative. We take a million years to get anything out. If you put things in perspective, most other companies probably launch more products in a single year than we have done in the past - since we were founded."
"It's like a running joke. We launch on the average maybe five, or four new products a year? And our customer base complains that we launch the products too fast. I'm trying to figure out why. Most other companies launch about 50 new products a year, or even 100. We launch very few products - but products that everybody wants. If there are 50, you might only want one of them, or three of them, but because we're just so lazer-focused on gamers themselves, every single thing becomes a gamer's requirement."