SEA Q2 Earnings Call/Analyst Q-A: My Notes

SE Q2 Earnings Call w/ Analyst Q&A
8/17/2021

Q Garena: How should we think about potential competition developing similar games? RE: New games
contribution
A They believe gaming is not a competition business. Freefire is a platform in which they continue to
see growth. They’ll continue to grow the platform and ways to monetize the game. They don’t discuss
pipeline games.

Q What will we see re: e-commerce in the future re: Pandemic?
A During Covid they will see growth in health and beauty and grocery delivery.

Q Shopee in Indonesia. What are plans in other parts of the world?
A Nothing more to announce at this point.

Q Guidance for gaming indicates softness in the 2nd half. Please expand.
A +40% growth y/y, which is a record. Their focus is to continue to grow their user base and paid user
base. Their past track record is that they’ve proven they’re effective at doing this in the past.

Q Ecommerce- What factors in what countries have lowest take rate?
A Attributable to advertisement and marketing tools. It’s not driven by any one particular market.

Q S&M increases in ecommerce
A Given their strong market leadership, it’s normal and natural during this phase of their growth.

Q Shed color in one new region you’re moving into. How would you rate your strength/weakness in this
area?
A Having launched recently in Brazil, this area has a very low ecommerce penetration, so they see a
long runway in Brazil. SE Asia focus on high margin categories.

Q Shopee in Brazil. Any color in terms of the % of revenue in Brazil and growth expectations for
Brazil.
A We don’t break this out. Still very early stage. Will continue to study this, stay humble and
proceed accordingly.

Q Is it because of better monetization in Indonesia that the numbers look so good.
A Most of monetization came from transaction fees and advertisement adoption. Still very early stages.
Take rate is relatively low as they’re still relatively early in this opportunity.

Q Looking at user base for Garena, where are you seeing growth in the market?
A Came from all 3 regions of South East Asia and Latin America, especially in Freefire game.

Q Provide color in investments in ecommerce and increased investments in going into Brazil?
A 12% and 18% take rate for certain sellers. Still assessing growth potential.

Q Leader has made significant investments in Latin America, please provide color.
A Latin and early stages of growth when they started in South East Asia.

–Additional Remarks from CEO and CFO–
Improved Guidance:
Digital Entertainment is now expected to be $4.5B-4.7B
Ecommerce GAAP revenue is now expected to be $4.7 -$4.9B

Adding (physical) Shopee Centers in Indonesia and adding Shopee classes in local universities.

Adding Shopee Centers to help local farmers sell their goods

Serve the underserved and help people to digitalize. Bettering lives through technology.

Garena bookings were up 55% y/y

Quarterly paying users increased 92% y/y

Freefire was highest grossing video game in history of video gaming

Shopee was the most downloaded app on Google and Apple Pay

Shopee ranked 1st in total downloads and most popular mobile app in MAU’s

A substantial population in their markets is benefitting from the Shopee ecosystem.

SeaMoney mobile wallet services was up approx. 150%

Recently expanded partnership with Mastercard and partnering with Pure Gold to accept SeaMoney.

–Financials–
Growth mainly came from ecommerce business (grew revenue 191% y/y) as well as digital entertainment (grew revenue 65%)

Thank you to all who make Saul’s board the special place that it has become. Shout out to the board managers and Saul for what must be a thankless job of managing the one-liner posts, etc. and the time/effort you invest in managing this.

sjo

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When reading the Press Release, which was really impressive to me is the following:

In Brazil, where Shopee was launched in late 2019, it ranked first in the Shopping
category by downloads and total time spent in app, and ranked second by average
monthly active users for the second quarter of 2021, according to App Annie

This was such a strong performance that I can’t believe my eyes, since Sea keeps emphasizing that their Brazil expansion has just started. Remember that Brazil is one of MercadoLibre’s key markets.

I guess that Sea is putting significant marketing budgets in the Brazil market now. And Sea has way more cash to burn than its e-commerce competitors because Sea has an extremely profitable gaming segment of business.

Great earning results!

Long SE (12%)

Luffy

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When reading the Press Release, which was really impressive to me is the following:

In Brazil, where Shopee was launched in late 2019, it ranked first in the Shopping
category by downloads and total time spent in app, and ranked second by average
monthly active users for the second quarter of 2021, according to App Annie

This was such a strong performance that I can’t believe my eyes, since Sea keeps emphasizing that their Brazil expansion has just started. Remember that Brazil is one of MercadoLibre’s key markets.

I guess that Sea is putting significant marketing budgets in the Brazil market now. And Sea has way more cash to burn than its e-commerce competitors because Sea has an extremely profitable gaming segment of business.

Great earning results!

This is interesting but difficult to reconcile with other data ranking Latin American ecommerce companies. According to the report linked below (dated July 13, 2021), Mercadolibre is still the clear leader by far in Latin America as well as Brazil in visits per month:

https://www.webretailer.com/b/online-marketplaces-latin-amer…

Mercadolibre is #1 in Latin America with 667.7 million visits per month. Amazon is #2 with 169 million and Sea Limited (Shopee) is #5 with 40.7 million. It breaks down Mercadolibre’s visits per month by country. Brazil is its top market with 40% of total visits at 272 million visits per month. So by this metric, Mercadolibre still has at least more than 6 times the monthly visitors of Shopee in Brazil (and more than 16 times in all of Latin America). The report also states that Amazon is #2 in Brazil with 92 million visits per month. Two other ecommerce companies headquartered in Brazil, Americanas and Casas Bahia (ranked #3 and #4 in visitors per month in Latin America), may also still be ahead of Shopee in Brazil .

Both Mercadolibre and Sea Limited continue to have exceptional growth. While off to a strong start in Latin America, Sea Limited still has a large market opportunity in Southeast Asia alone. And with the still low ecommerce penetration in Latin America, there should be plenty of room for both to grow in the region for awhile. With time, the competition in Latin America might heat up. I happen to own both among my top three positions so I will be keeping tabs on how this competition progresses. But given Amazon’s inability to unseat Mercadolibre in Latin America, I’m still betting on Mercadolibre to remain top dog in the region.

Dave

Long SE, MELI

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Dave - I think part of the difference is to do with total visits (PC internet and mobile) vs mobile app downloads. We know that Shopee is a more mobile first business strategy so I’m comfortable with the 2 data sources and accounting for the differences.

WRT SEA a few points stood out:-

  1. How SEA are building a digital gaming/entertainment platform onto Free Fire together with new functionality as well as new games and teetering on the edge of eSports which will be interesting if they really try to capture that direction with Garena.
  2. Improvements in eCommerce unit economics with 20% improvement in margin per unit shipped as well as the reaching of profitability in now Malaysia on top of Taiwan. Clearly country by country are becoming profitable whilst they double down investments in new geographies
  3. Increasing up take of digital wallet payments - although I wish they would break out the on platform vs off platform usage as MercadoLibre does (granted it does mention the off platform developments).

Ant

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This is interesting but difficult to reconcile with other data ranking Latin American ecommerce companies. According to the report linked below (dated July 13, 2021), Mercadolibre is still the clear leader by far in Latin America as well as Brazil in visits per month: https://www.webretailer.com/b/online-marketplaces-latin-amer…

I’ve no idea which source of data is more accurate. As I said, I can’t believe the data I saw. But the data I quoted was highlighted in Sea’s press release, so I’d tend to trust that data more than other source. It’ll be terrible for a public company to reference mistrustful data in their press release.

I just checked App Annie by myself. It shows that Shopee ranked number 1 for downloads in the last week and ranked number 2 (right after Mercado Libra, but ahead of Amazon) for the “usage penetration” (not sure how App Annie defines this metric). I think it makes sense if Shopee is the top downloaded shopping app, because it’s a new APP while Mercado Libra has operated in the market for many years. What surprised me was that Sea claimed that the time spent in APP also ranked number 1 in Brazil according to App Annie. I don’t have a premium trial with App Annie so I can not verify whether this is true. But I assume Sea should have referenced the right data.

I noticed that the data link you posted did not mention mobile apps, but it described the companies as “websites”. Is it possible that the data source you shared was data for web visits, while the App Annie data is only for mobile APP? I did find from App Annie that, if I filter by mobile web, Shopee only ranked number 8 in Brazil.

Regards,
Luffy

3 Likes

Dave - I think part of the difference is to do with total visits (PC internet and mobile) vs mobile app downloads. We know that Shopee is a more mobile first business strategy so I’m comfortable with the 2 data sources and accounting for the differences.

WRT SEA a few points stood out:-
1) How SEA are building a digital gaming/entertainment platform onto Free Fire together with new functionality as well as new games and teetering on the edge of eSports which will be interesting if they really try to capture that direction with Garena.
2) Improvements in eCommerce unit economics with 20% improvement in margin per unit shipped as well as the reaching of profitability in now Malaysia on top of Taiwan. Clearly country by country are becoming profitable whilst they double down investments in new geographies
3) Increasing up take of digital wallet payments - although I wish they would break out the on platform vs off platform usage as MercadoLibre does (granted it does mention the off platform developments).

Ant

Thanks for the clarification. I thought this was the difference in the two data sets and should have made this clear in my post. I just wanted to point out the overall picture of ecommerce in Brazil/Latin America and where Sea/Shopee and Mercadolibe currently rank in this respect. I do think Sea’s update on app downloads shows a very strong momentum in Brazil at this time.

Dave

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I’ve no idea which source of data is more accurate. As I said, I can’t believe the data I saw. But the data I quoted was highlighted in Sea’s press release, so I’d tend to trust that data more than other source. It’ll be terrible for a public company to reference mistrustful data in their press release.

I just checked App Annie by myself. It shows that Shopee ranked number 1 for downloads in the last week and ranked number 2 (right after Mercado Libra, but ahead of Amazon) for the “usage penetration” (not sure how App Annie defines this metric). I think it makes sense if Shopee is the top downloaded shopping app, because it’s a new APP while Mercado Libra has operated in the market for many years. What surprised me was that Sea claimed that the time spent in APP also ranked number 1 in Brazil according to App Annie. I don’t have a premium trial with App Annie so I can not verify whether this is true. But I assume Sea should have referenced the right data.

I noticed that the data link you posted did not mention mobile apps, but it described the companies as “websites”. Is it possible that the data source you shared was data for web visits, while the App Annie data is only for mobile APP? I did find from App Annie that, if I filter by mobile web, Shopee only ranked number 8 in Brazil.

Regards,
Luffy

Yes, I think that the differences are mobile versus non mobile users and likely mobile app versus mobile browser users. As you point out, the app download data makes sense given the newness of the Shopee app and demonstrates strong business momentum for Shopee. But I agree that the #1 ranking of time spent on the app is surprising and difficult to reconcile with other data. Mercadolibre has had spectacular momentum in mobile usage itself according to recent data. In 2020, it had reportedly increased its mobile market share from 20% to 70%:

https://www.bugsnag.com/customers/mercado-libre

Per statista, at the end of 2020, mobile usage still only accounted for 67.1% of their transactions in Brazil of last year.

But their momentum in mobile usage continued through the last quarter according to their press release:

“Gross merchandise volume (“GMV”) grew to $7.0 billion, representing an increase of 39.2% in USD and 46.1% on an FX neutral basis… Mobile gross merchandise volume grew by 218.2% year-over-year on an FX neutral basis, reaching 73.4% of GMV.”

So Mobile GMV was growing much faster than overall GMV.

Since this data includes both mobile app and mobile browser users, I also would guess (as you suggested) that the App Annie data is specific to apps. This makes you wonder if one app is better than the other. But I don’t see any advantage in App ratings - Shopee Brazil gets a 4.7 and Mercodo Libre gets a 4.8. Maybe, for whatever reason, Mercado libre shoppers use the mobile browser more than Shopee shoppers? Maybe Mercado libre’s mobile browser website is easier to use than Shopee’s? Maybe the newness of the Shopee app results in more time spent on the app, learning how to use it? It is puzzling and bears watching.

Dave

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One of the reasons for the meteoric rise of Shoppee mobile downloads in Brazil is that SE offers Free Fire users perks if they download the Shoppee app. I heard this discussed publicly by Kris who leads the Potential Multibaggers service and is a SE expert.

I did a quick google search and confirmed this:
https://en.esportsku.com/en/tips-to-get-the-scar-blood-moon-…
https://shopee.co.id/Gift-skin-freefire-i.178679869.76135298…

That’s not to say this strategy is not driving real engagement (I think those numbers are up too), just that the app download data might be a little misleading.

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x Post from something I shared on SEA premium board for holders here…

OK - returning to the rare profit beat achievement and eCommerce forward momentum in terms of marketing spend and potential sales impact…

Shopee has settled on making every double day/month combo a shopping festival (like 11.11) - although I’m not sure what they do on 4:4 which equates to double death in Chinese. This week they have launched their 9:9 festival advertising campaign.

China might not be the target market but that doesn’t necessarily matter given his global superstar status, but instead of picking local stars to front advertising in Singapore this time around, they have gone with Jackie Chan!

Lazada have been going with BTS which must be costing them a fortune, but god knows what Jackie Chan is going to cost Shopee.

Fortunately they are getting a ton of column inches in additional PR covering the fact that he is doing his own stunt work for Shopee…

https://www.marketing-interactive.com/shopee-packs-a-punch-w…

So don’t expect the A&M spend to come under control this year - they’ve had a long list of top $ brand ambassadors to pay including Christian Ronaldo, Black Pink (Korean girl mega band), Gurmit Singh (a local Singaporean star) and now Jackie Chan.

Ant

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