You don’t hear the words “industrial espionage” get tossed around too liberally at a show like CES. But Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan invoked them yesterday in a post about a pair of the company’s crazy new laptop prototypes that apparently flew the coop from its booth, at the tail end of the event on Sunday afternoon.
Tan said in a Facebook post that Razer has been working with CES and law enforcement officials to find out how the pair of Project Valerie models vanished from the show floor,
At Razer, we play hard and we play fair. Our teams worked months on end to conceptualize and develop these units and we pride ourselves in pushing the envelope to deliver the latest and greatest.We treat theft/larceny, and if relevant to this case, industrial espionage, very seriously – it is cheating, and cheating doesn’t sit well with us. Penalties for such crimes are grievous and anyone who would do this clearly isn’t very smart.
The Valerie is one of the more ambitious pieces of hardware from the company, bringing a trio of 17.3-inch 4K displays to the laptop for a more immersive gaming experience. It was an impressive showing that helped make Razer one of the focal points of the Vegas event.
We reached out to the company to ask how someone could have walked off with not one, but two, of the high-profile products, given the level of security at an event like this. Razer didn’t respond to that question directly, but did reach out with the promise of a fairly large reward for information on the theft.
Here’s the response, in part,
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This note is to confirm that two Razer Project Valerie laptop prototypes were stolen from the Razer booth at CES. The product was taken from the Razer press room at approximately 4 p.m. on Sunday, January 8, 2017. A $25,000 reward is being offered for original information leading to the identification, arrest and conviction of a criminal suspect.
The company added that, thankfully, that those were not the sole two prototypes of the device.
