New Article on Sea Limited

-Sea has tripled since June, is up 25.6% YTD, and was even slightly up in today’s massive sell-of-

Some highlights that stuck out from the article:

-Southeast Asia has a youthful tech-savvy population with the median age being 30 years, and of the region’s 649 million population, four hundred million are online, 90% of them mobile-first which plays very well into Sea’s highly popular mobile game - Free Fire, and its e-commerce platform - Shopee, both of which were developed with a mobile-first approach from the get-go.

-Southeast Asians are also avid internet users; of the top 10 countries in APAC region by average daily time spent using the internet, six are in Southeast Asia namely Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, and Vietnam. These countries beat out developed nations such as Australia, South Korea, and New Zealand.

  • With 94% of them intending to continue using the online service post-pandemic, this Covid-induced digital transition is likely to outlast the pandemic, signaling a long-term behavioral evolution rather than a temporary adjustment.

-E-commerce penetration still has tremendous room for growth in almost all of Shopee’s markets in Southeast Asia; online retail accounts for just 1% of Southeast Asia’s total retail sales, compared with about 6%-8% in Europe and North America. This indicates ample room for growth for Shopee going forward.

The Fintech Opportunity

  • 70% of Southeast Asians are underbanked or unbanked, meaning they have no access to bank accounts, credit services, or other financial services.

Financials

-Sea has delivered solid top-line growth, and shows no sign of stopping; revenues soared 163% year-on-year in 2019 to USD 2.1 billion, (compared with 99% YoY growth the previous year when revenues jumped to USD 826 million from USD 414 million a year earlier). According to the latest full year results presented in their latest earnings call, revenues rose 101.1% YoY, registering another year of triple-digit revenue growth rates.

-Sea’s operating margin and net loss margins have been consistently improving over the past few years. Operating loss margins dropped from 121% in 2017 to 40.9% in 2019, and net loss margins dropped from 135% in 2017 to 67% in 2019.

Full article below:

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4410973-sea-digital-economy…

Long SE (10%)

29 Likes

Nicely written and thorough article. I have held SE this last year for a 250% increase. And I bought some for my kids accounts. I am very familiar with SE businesses so this article is mostly old hat to me. But two things new that I learned from this article:

  • SE is now doing the direct product sales of private label goods. (kinda of like Costco Kirkland and Amazon)
  • The SE FreeFire mobile game is very popular because it can run on cheap old phones which is the norm in Southeast Asia. This is why it is the top mobile game in the world.

-zane

4 Likes

Guys - just a quick field report from here in Singapore…

This weekend whilst out at a local cafe, I noticed for the first time Shopee Pay (which is SEA’s payments business) there on the counter with a QR code as a payment option in physical retail. I’d only ever seen it on the Shopee website previously. When mentioning this to a friend over here, he happened to also share that his wife had seen Shopee Pay cropping up increasingly in store. I’m not sure if this is as a direct result of obtaining one of the Singapore digital banking licenses or whether this move predates that but clearly they are closing the loop in the financial space in Singapore with banking, settlements and payment processing. I expect them to be a serious “challenger” bank vs the well entrenched major local banks (OCBC, DBS and UOB) and foreign banks with a presence here (Standard Chartered, HSBC, ANZ, Citi and ICBC).

Shopee Pay is looking as though it is about to go through the same hyper growth as Shopee eCommerce has gone through over the last 5 years.

I might have shared these before but here are a few links to broker reports on SEA from here in Singapore…

https://www1.dbsvonline.com/DBSVReport/2020/12/2020120717305…

https://www1.dbsvonline.com/DBSVReport/2020/10/2020102911531…

Ant

57 Likes

Shopee Pay is looking as though it is about to go through the same hyper growth as Shopee eCommerce has gone through over the last 5 years.

Here is an excerpt from another positive report on SE.

Is Sea Limited (NYSE:SE) the right investment to pursue these days? The best stock pickers were betting on the stock. The number of bullish hedge fund positions moved up by 20 lately. Sea Limited (NYSE:SE) was in 115 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of December. The all time high for this statistic was previously 82. This means the bullish number of hedge fund positions in this stock currently sits at its all time high. Our calculations also showed that SE ranked 15th among the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds (click for Q4 rankings). There were 95 hedge funds in our database with SE holdings at the end of September.

The article can be accessed at;

https://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/is-sea-limited-se-stock-a…

All three of Sea Ltd major businesses seem to be growing nicely

cheers

draj

4 Likes