GROWTH TRAJECTORY

“We didn’t have manufacturing facilities in Singapore before the pandemic, so we pretty much built a production line from scratch to help ensure that we had a domestic supply of masks”

to give away five million masks to Singapore residents aged 16 and above, who can redeem them by using the Razer Pay wallet app to verify their identity. The move met with some public criticism, but Tan justified the use of Razer Pay as necessary for preventing fraudulent claims of free masks.

“We didn’t have manufacturing facilities in Singapore before this, so we pretty much built a production line from scratch to help ensure that we had a domestic supply of masks,” says Tan. That took just 24 days, not least because the company knows how to make things—a capability that has new urgency in this Covid-19 landscape of uncertain supply chains. “I do think there is going to be a growing appreciation for not just software, but also for hardware and the ability to produce critical items in a very short amount of time. That’s going to be a big fundamental shift.” In fact, he muses, “Now that we have learned a lot about our capabilities in medtech, we may be able to expand into new areas, if need be.”

Razer is still often described as a gaming hardware manufacturing firm, but Tan prefers the description of youth lifestyle company. This puts the emphasis on not just its laser focus on its core demographic but also leaves room for the growing diversity of its ecosystem.

This includes Razer Gold, a virtual currency used for digital content in 130 countries. There’s also Razer Fintech, an offline-to-online Southeast Asian digital payment network that processed over US$2 billion in payments in 2019. Both are involved in Razer’s other pandemic-related initiative, a US$50 million Covid-19