Shares of the company rose sevenfold in seven days from Feb. 22 to March 5, boosted by news that Super X-Fi technology won the Best of CES Award 2018 in Las Vegas and positive analyst reports. The stock has since given up some of those gains, but the company’s market value has stabilized at about S$365 million, up from about S$80 million in 2017.
“It could be the next big thing,’’ said Justin Tang, head of Asian research at United First Partners, which specializes in event-driven research. The company can explore licensing opportunities with phone makers, gaming companies and even carmakers in order to monetize it, he said.
Marc Tan, an analyst at KGI Securities in Singapore, said that while 3D audio is a “huge untapped market,’’ Sim has many competitors, including Samsung Electronics Co.’s Harman. “Creative will need to build up a large user base quickly in order to establish itself as the market leader,’’ he said.
Sim said he’s targeting 50 million Super X-Fi customers in two years, including free users. The company has struck partnerships, including with iVideoSmart, a Singapore-based video publishing platform with 75 million users.
Creative is exploring ways to increase usage and make money from its invention. Last month, it said it’s ready to work with original equipment manufacturers to incorporate its headphone technology into their products. “My goal is to have every headphone user enjoy Super X-Fi,’’ Sim said.
Still, Super X-Fi products aren’t expected to contribute significantly to overall revenue in the current quarter ending March 31, the company said last week. The net loss for the three months ended December 31 widened to $4.9 million from $4.2 million a year ago. Shares tumbled 11 percent on Friday.
Sim was born in Singapore in 1955, the same year Jobs was born in San Francisco. When Sim was about 10, he took his eldest brother’s harmonica and began learning to play it by himself. That led to to his lifelong passion for music. He attended Ngee Ann Polytechnic and earned an electrical and electronics engineering diploma in 1975. He never got a university degree.
In 1981, Sim founded Creative Technology as a computer shop with his school friend Ng Kai Wa and $6,000. They did whatever it took to keep the business going -- computer classes, hardware repair and software development. Later, Creative began to build PC add-on boards, which included a graphics card that could display Chinese characters in 1982. In 1986, the company developed the world’s first multimedia, multilingual computer, the Cubic CT. Its audio interface led to the development of the Sound Blaster.
Creative debuted Sound Blasters at a computer trade show in Las Vegas in November 1989. Sim still recalls vividly the moment Michael Jackson, while on a tour of the exhibition, walked into his booth because it was the only one buzzing with sound. (In those days, PCs were quiet.) Fascinated to hear audio coming out of a PC, the King of Pop stayed for half an hour. “It was a good omen,’’ Sim said.
In 1992, Creative became the first Singaporean company to list shares on Nasdaq. It applied for a dual listing in Singapore two years later. The Singapore initial public offering was oversubscribed and the shares surged as much as 16 percent on their debut. By 2000, Sim was Singapore’s youngest billionaire. Creative dominated the PC audio market until the 2000s before it lost ground to OEM PCs that were built with integrated sound cards.