Creative Technology: the MP3 player's inventor, crushed by the iPod

Sim Wong Hoo founded Creative Technology in 1981 as a small computer shop in Singapore's Chinatown, and in 1989 the company's Sound Blaster sound card made it the standard for PC audio. By 2019 the company had sold 400 million audio products, and at its peak in March 2000 its shares traded at S$64.

In 1999 Creative created the MP3 player market with the NOMAD. When Apple launched the iPod in October 2001, Creative argued it would win on sound quality — and lost the market Apple had effectively taken over within a few years. In 2006 Creative sued Apple over the iPod's user interface and settled for US$100 million.

The company never recovered from the iPod. Creative was delisted from the Nasdaq in 2007, its shares fell from the S$64 peak of 2000 to around S$1 by 2017, and years of net losses followed. In 2019 the company bet US$100 million on Super X-Fi, a headphone technology licensed under a 20-year deal, but it failed to reverse the decline.

In December 2022 Sim led one more restructuring. He died on 4 January 2023, aged 67, still chairman and chief executive of the company he had run for 42 years. In the six months to December 2022 Creative still lost US$6.1 million, sales for the year fell 8 per cent and its gross margin had slipped from 32 per cent to 25 per cent — the Sound Blaster giant had become a shadow of the company that once defined PC audio.