Singapore gaming giant Razer delisted from Hong Kong in May 2022 in a US$3.17 billion take-private deal led by co-founder Tan Min-Liang, but minority shareholders cried foul over an offer price below the 2017 IPO level.
Razer, founded in 2005 and headquartered in Singapore and the United States, is the world's best-known gaming hardware brand, selling laptops, peripherals and software to a cult-like following of gamers. It listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in November 2017 at HK$3.88 a share amid great fanfare, but the stock languished for years on thin trading volumes, which the founders blamed on Hong Kong investors undervaluing a tech growth story.
In December 2021 a consortium led by chairman and CEO Tan Min-Liang and non-executive director Lim Kaling, who together owned about 57 per cent of the company, teamed with private equity firm CVC Capital Partners to propose taking Razer private at HK$2.82 per share. The deal valued the firm at about US$3.17 billion, a premium of just 5.6 per cent to the undisturbed price before the announcement, though a larger premium to the depressed levels of late 2021. The consortium argued Razer would be better off away from the quarterly glare, with plans to eventually relist in the United States at a higher valuation.
Shareholders approved the scheme on April 26, 2022, with 94.74 per cent of disinterested votes in favour, and the shares were withdrawn from the exchange on May 13. But the deal left a sour taste among retail investors. The HK$2.82 offer sat well below the HK$3.88 IPO price, meaning anyone who had bought at listing and held was being cashed out at a loss, a timing critics called opportunistic. Commentators noted Tan had received US$10.457 million in compensation in 2020, mostly in shares, dwarfing the company's US$805,000 net profit that year, and pointed to his reported S$52.8 million good-class bungalow purchase as evidence that insiders had done far better than the public shareholders footing the bill.
Defenders countered that the market, not the founders, set the share price, and that investors knew the risks. Still, the episode became a landmark in Singapore investor discourse about founder-led buyouts: a beloved homegrown tech champion going private at a price its earliest public believers could only describe as a disappointment.
Since going private, Razer has stayed out of the public markets, and the once-mooted American relisting has yet to materialise. For the minority shareholders who accepted the HK$2.82, the episode remains a sore point whenever founder-led buyouts surface in Hong Kong and Singapore markets.