Shopee beat Lazada — which is backed by Alibaba — in every Southeast Asian market. A Singaporean startup outcompeted the most powerful e-commerce company in Asia. That wasn't supposed to happen.
I'm Chinese-born, educated at Stanford, building a company headquartered in Singapore that serves 700 million people across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and India. This is what globalization actually looks like.
I built a gaming company, an e-commerce company, and a fintech company. At the same time. In Southeast Asia. Everyone said pick one. I said: they feed each other. Garena funds Shopee. Shopee feeds SeaMoney.
Free Fire has 150 million daily active users. It's the most downloaded mobile game in history. A game made in Singapore, designed for phones that cost $100, played by people who've never owned a console.
Our market cap went from $4 billion to $200 billion in three years. Then back to $25 billion. The rollercoaster didn't change the business. The business was always the same. The market just stopped paying for growth.
When the market crashed, we cut costs, shut down Shopee in France and India, and focused on profitability. Q4 2022 — first profitable quarter. Sometimes the best growth strategy is knowing when to stop growing.