Sea slams on the brakes: A turbulent September for Southeast Asia’s biggest tech company

Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1330

In the early morning of September 8, a Shopee Mexico employee ended a video conference with the Singapore headquarters and was ready to start the day. The next day is the 9.9 promotion, the most important event of Shopee every year, just like the Double Eleven for Taobao. For two months in a row, remote meetings across time zones followed one another.

The employee won’t know the specific results of his two months of hard work. Ten minutes after hanging up, he was notified of his dismissal. The day before the 9.9 promotion, almost all of Shopee’s local employees in Mexico (including expatriate employees) were dismissed, and only some management members had the opportunity to transfer back to the Southeast Asian market.

The same scene also happened in Colombia, Chile and other regions, Shopee just entered these American countries last year. Ten days later, the layoffs spread to Shopee’s headquarters in Singapore and its offices in China, affecting at least thousands of people.

Shopee’s parent company, Sea Group, is the largest technology company in Southeast Asia. At the end of last year, its market value exceeded US$200 billion, but it is currently only US$30.7 billion, and its stock price has fallen by more than 80% from its peak. The company was established in Singapore in 2009, started with games, and incubated the e-commerce platform Shopee in 2015. Sea currently has three major businesses: game entertainment business Garena, e-commerce business Shopee and digital financial business Sea Money.

Among them, Shopee is the most imaginative. It has become the e-commerce platform with the highest turnover in Southeast Asia in the first quarter of 2019, surpassing Ali’s Lazada. That year, Shopee’s GMV (transaction volume) was $17.6 billion.

It has also received investment from Tencent and is good at acquiring customers through subsidies and other strategies to win growth. The rise of Shopee is considered to be another surprise attack by the Ali department after Pinduoduo.

In 2021, Shopee will gain ground in the global market, rapidly entering 7 new countries, and GMV will increase by 76.8% year-on-year to US$62.5 billion. Under the big expansion, Sea already has 67,000 employees throughout 2021, double the number of the previous year. Shopee has incubated many innovative projects at the same time, including Lovito, an independent women’s clothing station for Southeast Asia similar to SHEIN, in order to increase user activity on the station, as well as to deal with TikTok’s short video business Shopee Video, and to increase its Southeast Asian takeaway business Shopee Food. put in.

In Sea’s anniversary internal letter on May 8, 2021, the management hoped to achieve a market value of 100 billion in ten years three years ago. As a result, this ten-year goal was achieved in only three years. At that time, Sea’s internal letter wrote that looking at the market value and scale of global technology companies, only five trillion-dollar market value companies such as Amazon, Apple, and Google have fundamentally changed consumers, “I hope Sea is one of them.”

During the expansion, Shopee aggressively recruited, significantly pushing up the market price of cross-border trade talent. A few months ago, in order to recruit an employee who had been in Shopee for many years, Pinduoduo HR offered a promise of a monthly salary of more than 50,000 yuan. After this round of layoffs, there are no longer any competitors willing to spend so much on the market, and Pinduoduo will immediately cut the salary of this employee in half.

It is not only the wages of practitioners in this industry that are shrinking, but also the industry’s expectations for the future.

A sign that lasted for more than half a year, and the sudden braking completed in two weeks

On Monday, September 19, in Building No. 1, Phase 4 of Shanghai Science and Technology Oasis, the thousands of employees in this 6-storey single building had no heart to work.

An employee at the opposite station suddenly stood up and said, “I was called by HR.” Everyone knew that one more colleague was missing.

The employee took a live photo of the office while he waited. He later realized that everyone in the photo had been cropped. He also noticed that there is a terrace from the fifth floor to the sixth floor of the building, which is usually open. The door to the patio was also locked that day.

This day was quickly reported by many Chinese and foreign media – Shopee held an all-staff meeting on the same day, announcing that it would make team adjustments and cut some positions, and some business lines had layoffs as high as 60%. What happened in the Shanghai office building is just a common scene that Shopee has staged in many office buildings around the world.

Shopee’s layoffs are cold but compliant. When the employee who was notified of his resignation returned to his station, he had no access to any office systems, and had to pack up and hand over his work card immediately. “There wasn’t even any job handover,” said one laid-off employee. Shopee’s compensation is N+2 (the base is the employee’s own salary, not three times the legal local average monthly salary), and all employees who have been employed for less than one year will be compensated according to one year of service. However, if the separation agreement has not been signed by Wednesday that week, employees will receive less compensation.

A person familiar with the Sea Group level said that the scope and personnel of layoffs are directly determined by higher-level management, and many front-line managers are not even informed of the specific situation on the day when their subordinates are laid off.

The person told LatePost that the company chose such a rigid method in order to complete the layoffs in the shortest time, so that the business can return to normal operation as soon as possible.

Layoffs aren’t new for almost any company in 2022, but it’s not uncommon for a major expansion like Shopee’s to go from adding tens of thousands of people in a year so quickly to switching to big layoffs in a matter of weeks.

“LatePost” interviewed many employees and learned that the overall layoff ratio of Sea is 10%. According to the number of 67,000 employees at the end of 2021, this involves thousands of employees: Shopee’s cross-border e-commerce business has a small proportion of layoffs, probably in 5%-10%; the proportion of layoffs in some businesses of the game business Garena is about 15%. The hardest hit area for layoffs is the “local business” of the new business Foody and Shopee: attracting local investment and local sales in overseas markets.

There are also signs of sudden braking. Earlier this year, Shopee abruptly cut its marketing budget for new markets such as France, Spain, and India. At this point, it’s only two months before Shopee enters these countries, and the team members are looking forward to a big hit.

“The ratio of budget shrinkage is about 30%,” said a former Shopee employee in charge of marketing. Because of this adjustment, the planned series of market activities has become unsustainable. Two months later, Shopee announced in March that it was closing its French and Indian sites and laying off some employees.

A mid-level Shopee executive said that Sea founder and CEO Li Xiaodong and management had a comprehensive and detailed staff review meeting in June to figure out “the minimum number of people needed” in each market, and they also decided to go further. Shrinking the market, the most direct measure is the market growth space and whether the breakeven can be achieved.

After this meeting, Chris Feng, President of Sea Group and CEO of Shopee, issued a letter to all staff, proposing that Shopee will focus on core business and specialize in Southeast Asia and other markets. Some adjustments to optimize our operations in certain market segments. These changes will impact certain roles on a small number of teams…”

Soon, Sea started a new wave of large-scale layoffs – Shopee announced the closure of its Spanish site, and also adopted a certain percentage of layoffs in core Southeast Asian markets including Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam, and abolished some overseas operations and domestic operations. Employees in cross-border businesses; emerging businesses such as food delivery, independent stations, and non-core businesses such as cloud computing have started large-scale layoffs; Garena also quickly cut down 3 game projects, which is close to half of its total number of projects.

“Cost reduction” has also penetrated into various businesses. “The ability to make money has become the most critical indicator of doing business,” said a Garena producer. The game he participated in was canceled due to internal judgments of unclear profit prospects. The Free Fire team was instructed to cut back on various aspects. In the past, the team could even spend millions of dollars to make promotional videos for newly launched characters in the game. Now these budgets are directly cut in half. “Some animation effects cannot be done due to insufficient budget, and the boss will suggest replacing them with pictures,” said a Free Fire employee.

Hiring across businesses has also suddenly become stricter. Some positions have been upgraded from 1 year experience to requiring 3 years experience; after that, the two core businesses of Shopee and Garena have stopped the recruitment of non-core positions and grassroots employees.

Numerous benefits have also been eliminated. Business travel for employees is limited to economy class airfare, and travel meals and lodging are limited to $30 and $150 per day, respectively. The company’s yoga classes, boxing classes, English corner activities, quarterly team building, and annual physicals have all disappeared.

But these are not enough. “LatePost” learned that more than a week before Sea released its second-quarter financial report in August, the group’s executives once again discussed the company’s operating conditions. It was also at this meeting that executives decided to immediately start a new round of business contraction and layoffs.

Compared with the adjustment in June, the layoffs that started in August have a wider scope. A person close to Sea management told LatePost that most of the staff layoffs in June were because their projects were shut down. The wave that started in August is a company-wide forced cost reduction, that is, regardless of whether the employee’s project is shut down or not, it must bear the corresponding layoff target.

The team of the shooting game Free Fire is the most profitable business in the Sea Group. In the first half of the year, it plans to expand the current team of more than 300 people to 400-500 people. After August, Free Fire also started layoffs.

At present, Sea’s first and second rounds of layoffs have been completed, but this is not the end. CEO Li Xiaodong said in an internal letter in mid-September that “this is not a storm that will end soon.” He said the company’s main goal in the next 12 to 18 months is to achieve positive cash flow as soon as possible.

Unlimited e-commerce expansion: single volume is higher than GMV

The past year has been one where Shopee has not been shy about revealing its ambitions.

Since its establishment in 2015, Shopee has been focusing on Taiwan and the six Southeast Asian markets for a long time. It was not until four years later that it went out of Asia for the first time and opened up the Brazilian market. However, in the six months after May 2021, Shopee broke into seven new markets in one go, namely Mexico, Chile, Colombia, India, as well as Poland, Spain, and France.

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The confidence is because Shopee has proved its determination and ability to expedition in the Brazilian market for more than a year.

In 2019, Shopee just surpassed Lazada, which is backed by Alibaba, to become the e-commerce platform with the highest market share in Southeast Asia. Its management believes that its rapid growth method of free shipping and subsidies can be applied to other markets in the world with the same large number of people and relatively low penetration rate of e-commerce. Based on this logic, the team chose Brazil as the first market to enter.

Like opening the Indonesian market before, when Shopee entered Brazil in 2019, CEO Feng Zhimin personally led the team to develop it, and then handed it over to the local team to lead. “Like Southeast Asia, Brazil is Shopee’s base,” said a Shopee employee. “It’s a consensus within the company.”

Shopee’s presence in Brazil has been very enthusiastic, not only co-marketing with the Free Fire game, which is doing well in the market, but also launching a six-month-long “free shipping” campaign to attract consumers – no matter how cheap, the goods are from China and Southeast Asia. Direct mail to Brazil. Shopee paid a high shipping subsidy for this.

Investment and subsidies have resulted in astonishing growth. In 2020, the monthly number of Brazilians opening Shopee grew from 18 million to 47 million. Shopee launched its first TV commercial in Brazil at the end of the year, moving from purely new user acquisition to branding. In the fourth quarter of 2021, the number of Shopee Brazil orders increased to 140 million, a four-fold increase compared to the same period last year, ranking first in the downloads of Android shopping apps in Brazil.

Shopee’s strategy in the past was to open cross-border businesses in new markets first and lure users with subsidized, low-priced items. After gaining a certain market share and popularity, Shopee began to recruit local merchants with goods and factories to start local business. Local business goods travel shorter distances for faster and cheaper delivery.

In May 2021, Shopee opened up local merchants to the Brazilian market, which has been in operation for a year and a half. According to Felipe Piringer, as of April 2022, the Shopee Brazil site had about 2 million local seller stores, doubling in less than a year.

The experience of victory is highly affirmed, and it becomes more and more solid as a creed.

Starting in 2020, the epidemic has catalyzed the consumption of e-commerce and games around the world. In the first quarter of this year alone, Sea’s revenue and gross profit grew 103% and 424.1%, respectively. Over the next year or so, Sea’s market value rose nearly 10 times, surpassing $200 billion at one point, making it the third-largest Internet company in Asia, after Tencent and Alibaba.

Business continues to improve, stock prices continue to rise, and the rise of global competitors – SHEIN’s success has been widely recognized, TikTok has accelerated global e-commerce business expansion, and Ali has also made globalization its next business focus. Passively opened the road to big expansion in 2021. From February 2021, Shopee entered seven new countries. In September, Sea raised another $6.3 billion through a stock and convertible bond offering.

Shopee tries to replicate the “pipeline” development strategy that has been successfully verified in the past to all new markets: use 1-2 months for preparatory work, including researching competing products, negotiating with local logistics providers, and inquiring about cross-border sellers’ willingness and so on; the next step is to launch various social networks, download channels, and media magazines; after the downloads are obtained, new users will be attracted to place orders, free shipping first, and then display discounted products.

Like the Southeast Asian market, Shopee will initially focus more on order volume in these new markets than on GMV and profitability. A former employee in charge of the delivery said that “the physical work is far more than the thinking”.

But the expedition came to an abrupt end. Spain, France, and India all ceased operations around half a year after testing, and Shopee gave developing markets a little more patience, but not as much. On the day of this year’s “9.9” big promotion, Shopee announced that it would close its local operations in Chile, Colombia and Mexico and completely withdraw from the Argentine market. Only the Brazilian market will continue to operate as usual.

Shopee’s strategy of trying to succeed again by copying the original path didn’t work. Quitting France is a classic example. An industry person who observed the early entry of Shopee into the French market said that Shopee encountered obstacles in the first step of user growth-continuation of the consistent low-price strategy, but still unable to attract users who are accustomed to Amazon and offline supermarkets. “Europe is a very fragmented market, and the launch strategy between countries has to be reworked.” A Shopee employee said.

Shopee didn’t expect the difficulty of reaching new markets. In determining the new market target, the European three countries and India were put together – at that time Shopee’s internal default was not to be a major player in the Indian market. “France and Spain are just trying, after all, Amazon doesn’t have a dominant position in Europe,” said a Shopee employee. Shopee’s free shipping in these two countries only lasted 1-2 months.

Markets often attribute the success of Shopee and Lazada to doing a good job of “localization”, finding local merchants earlier, making products cheaper and faster. But Shopee in Spain and France was not fully invested in localization from the start.

Until early 2022, Shopee does not have a dedicated localization team in either country, but a local team coordinating the gaming business to assist. Non-local operations have no cultural background. When designing, you can only search on Google which colors are taboo and which templates are used more often. It is definitely not as sophisticated as the local e-commerce websites that have been operating for many years. Shopee also does not have local warehouses in the two places. The goods are shipped from Southeast Asia and other places, and the fulfillment time is as long as 10 days – 20 days.

Not only is the new market frustrated, but Shopee’s Southeast Asian fundamentals will also have storms in 2021. In the middle of the year, the President of Indonesia came forward to accuse Shopee, Lazada and other platforms of dumping Chinese goods, and small-value inbound parcels had to increase tariffs, which meant that the cross-border goods that originally took the low-priced route lost profit or no price advantage, while beauty cosmetics , textiles, digital accessories, wood products and other commodities can no longer go through cross-border channels. Overnight, Shopee’s cross-border orders quickly shrank, and many stores were forced to shut down, as well as overseas warehouses. In the self-operated business in Indonesia, the team has opened more new jobs, and even further expanded the local R&D and supply chain teams.

However, some Shopee sources said that Shopee’s e-commerce business has always been based on the book, and the cross-border market in Indonesia accounts for a low single-digit percentage.

“Compared with last year’s strategy, this year’s strategy can be said to be reversed,” said the above-mentioned Shopee employee. As Shopee responded to the layoffs, “Given the heightened uncertainty in the current macro situation, we need to focus our resources on our core business.” This year, Shopee has turned its opposite in 2021, and all actions have become extra cautious.

In fact, in the first half of 2021, employees felt more clearly that Shopee was up and down, and all business goals switched from focusing on “growth” to focusing on “profitability”. Specific to the mature Southeast Asian market, Shopee’s goal has become to refine its operations and increase its reputation without increasing too much investment.

The priority of projects related to “cost reduction and efficiency improvement” has also been increased, such as increasing the penetration rate of self-operated express logistics in Southeast Asia, reducing the logistics cost of a single ticket in Brazil from 2 US dollars to 1 US dollars, and reducing the cost of launching new markets. At the same time, Shopee began to test allowing cross-border merchants to use third-party overseas warehouses. Compared with official overseas warehouses, merchants using third-party warehouses can reduce logistics costs by 20% for every 100 grams of cross-border goods, and 70% for 2 kilograms of goods.

A person familiar with the Sea Group level said that the company has attached great importance to the healthy development of Shopee from the early days, focusing on the beneficial improvement of unit economic benefits, not just growth. The company has continued to release financial indicators of adjusted EBITA per order from an earlier stage to communicate its concerns about the economic benefits of e-commerce, and this data continues to improve.

So far, Shopee’s newly entered markets in 2021 have closed three of France, Spain and India, and its local businesses in three Latin American countries, Mexico, Colombia and Chile, have been abolished. According to “LatePost”, these closed markets and The order volume of the business accounts for 5% of the overall Shopee.

A source close to Shopee revealed that at present, Shopee has almost no subsidies in Southeast Asia, and the budget for the new market that has been removed is reserved for Brazil. Shopee will no longer give “free shipping” subsidies to cross-border sellers in Mexico next month.

“LatePost” learned that Shopee will adjust the previous model of relying on low-cost orders in the future, from focusing on the explosive growth of orders to stable growth of orders, and then by increasing commissions, rates, and encouraging merchants to put more advertisements, Gradually reach profitability in each market. Currently, Shopee’s profitable markets include Taiwan and Malaysia.

“In the past, it was necessary to grow at all costs, and now it is necessary to look at the ROI (input-output ratio) for every growth.” The above-mentioned person close to Shopee said.

Strategy and Management: 11 Years of Calm and 2 Years of Haste

In the first 11 years of its 13-year history, Sea has maintained a relatively stable pace of development in business expansion and corporate governance most of the time.

Sea, which started with games, got the agency rights of the phenomenon-level game “League of Legends” in Southeast Asia in the second year of its establishment. With this, it became the first internet company in Singapore to be valued at over US$1 billion in 2014. A year later, Li Xiaodong founded the e-commerce platform Shopee. Before 2021, the territory of Shopee and Garena has been mainly focused on several Southeast Asian countries and Brazil; Garena has only one self-developed game launched, Free Fire.

Even in a market where e-commerce businesses choose to expand, Shopee’s logic is conservative. It did not do cross-border overseas business like Pinduoduo. It chose the largest and most mature US market as the first stop, but chose France and Spain. The aforementioned Shopee middle-level team said that the team initially considered the US market, but because the US market became hot It will burn a lot of money, so go to a medium-sized market such as France to try it first, and then consider entering the United States.

The fast in and out of markets such as France and Spain may not bring too much actual loss to Sea, but it exposed some of the company’s problems: First, it adopted the past model and tried to It is not effective to move relatively low-priced goods from Asia to Europe under unstable conditions; the second is the strategic ability of the team, and the control of the macro and competitive environment does not seem to meet expectations.

As of September 2022, Sea has a total of 5 major shareholders holding more than 5% of the shares, and they together hold 55% of the shares. Among them, Tencent has invested in Sea since 2013 and is the largest shareholder of the latter. Tencent reduced its stake in Sea worth US$3.01 billion in January this year, and its shareholding ratio dropped from 21.3% to 18.7%. Founder and CEO Li Xiaodong It holds 17.3% of the shares. Lee also holds 59.8 percent of the voting power.

Several of Sea’s core executives are company veterans, most of whom have joined the company for more than 10 years, including Group CEO Li Xiaodong, COO Ye Gang, CFO Hou Tianyu, Garena President Terry Zhao, and Shopee CPO Chen Jingye. Chris Feng, President of Sea Group and CEO of Shopee, was hired by Li Xiaodong to join Sea in 2013. Before that, he served as regional managing director for Zalora and Lazada, an e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia.

At Shopee’s Town Hall Meeting in the second quarter of 2022, employees found that Feng Zhimin was thinner and more haggard than the last time he appeared. When talking about many retreating actions, his tone was “still rational, still sincere”.

A middle-level shopee said that Feng Zhimin pursues fairness and rationality, and pays attention to “what is right”, which makes his decisions often very sudden, “His decisions seem to be correct, but they are not flexible enough in handling. Chris is very rational. After calculating the numbers, after getting the numbers in the second quarterly report, I started to calculate the profit and loss of the overall market, and I came to the conclusion that the sooner the layoffs, the better, so the decision was made immediately.”

Shopee launched Shopee Video at the end of 2021, which is embedded in the e-commerce app, intending to increase the activity and duration of users on the station, and cope with the fierce momentum of content e-commerce represented by TikTok. Even in the second quarter, which was a serious loss, Feng Zhimin still said that he highly valued the project, and the general direction of the business felt by employees was that “we should continue to invest.” Before the Spring Festival of 2022, the team tried pan-entertainment, pan-life, women-oriented, and product evaluation, and changed directions. After the year, it turned into commodity content, which also made employees feel that the decision-making change was sudden.

“Direct” is a description that pops out of many people’s minds when they think of Feng Zhimin. Some employees said that discussing things with Feng Zhimin is like a debate. For example, if you want to do a project, he will quickly throw a series of questions such as “Why do you want to do this?” “Have you really done it?” and so on.

Feng Zhimin is very concerned about product details, and has an engineer-level rigorous thinking. Any changes to the Shopee main site and any page that users will directly access, every line and every button modification must go through Feng Zhimin. He will pay attention to how the special effects of Shopee Video are set and how to design each step of the novice task.

Feng Zhimin, who was born in McKinsey, has very strict requirements for employees’ PPT reports. The font must be the font developed by Shopee, and the font size is also stipulated. The visual line of the PPT needs to be fixed from the upper left to the lower left, the upper right to the lower right, and the PPT should be full of piles. Tables and figures, data oriented. The reporting process is also fixed. The employee needs to send him the PPT one day before the meeting. He will ask some questions, and the report the next day needs to answer these questions.

Sea’s crises today began when it became a global corporation.

For a long time in the past, Sea was just a startup company based in the Southeast Asian market. After founder Li Xiaodong came to this land with less competition, he only needed to consider a few things that were quite focused: what is the local market demand, whether the team is strong enough, how to spend money, and how much money to spend.

Driven by the epidemic, global online consumption has risen, and Sea is the most direct beneficiary. In the first quarter of 2020 alone, Sea’s revenue and gross profit increased by 57.9% and 424.1%, respectively. Over the next year or so, Sea’s shares rose nearly 10-fold to $190.8 billion, making it Asia’s third-largest internet company.

With its high stock price, Sea will start a major expansion in 2021, expanding from Southeast Asian countries to Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Brazil in South America, and France and Spain in Europe. Garena simultaneously launched 6 – 7 new game projects.

It’s been a very rushed 2 years. Sea will suddenly add more than 30,000 people in 2021, doubling the previous year, when the number of employees added each year was only a few thousand.

The sudden increase in staff means greater challenges in management. In terms of collaboration, the self-developed Sea Talk is used internally by Sea, which is more like corporate WeChat, unlike Feishu, which collects all work requirements. For example, to transfer a piece of code between technologies, the “isometric font” function needs to be used. Feishu has corresponding Function support, Sea Talk does not have this function, and the displayed code is difficult to understand.

The company also subscribed to Google’s office system. An employee said, “I was looking for OKR for a long time at first, and found it in a Google Sheets called OKR in Google Drive.” OKR is not only “hidden deep”, but also has little relevance to the actual performance appraisal of employees. The technical team did not have KPIs until 2018, and changed to OKRs last year.

Heading into 2022, things took a turn for the worse.

Affected by local policies, Shopee has encountered strong supervision in Colombia, Argentina, Mexico and other countries.

As Sea’s second-largest revenue-generating unit, the first quarter earnings report of this year showed that the profit of Garena, the game and entertainment business, fell by nearly 40% to $430 million, and Free Fire entered the downward stage of its life cycle, with quarterly active users and paying users each dropping by 5% year-on-year. % and 23%, and by the second quarter, these two figures further expanded to 14.6% and 39%.

This year, Free Fire was taken off the shelves in India. Free Fire is Garena’s main game product. Statistics from data agency AppAnnie show that in January 2022, this shooting game has 75 million monthly active users worldwide, of which more than 40 million are from India. However, some Sea people said that India’s MAU contribution to the game is far less than that.

The macro-economy and the general environment are affecting the survival of enterprises more directly. Typical examples are Alibaba and Amazon. The national income of China and the United States and the spending power of ordinary households will directly determine the performance of these two companies.

Entering 2022, Sea’s financing environment has changed as the Fed’s interest rate hike and the continuous return of the US dollar have caused a huge shock in the global stock market. Sea CEO Li Xiaodong said in an open letter that investors have turned to safe-haven investments, making it difficult for the company to raise funds in the market. Many countries around the world are trapped in inflation, superimposed on the lifting of epidemic restrictions, consumers are no longer highly dependent on online consumption and online entertainment, and both Shopee and Garena’s revenue growth has slowed down significantly.

Sea’s past success has largely relied on its in-depth understanding of each market in Southeast Asia, finely localized adaptation of its business, subsidized strategies, and the hard work of carrying out a large number of operations similar to Chinese Internet companies. Today, when it decides to go out of Southeast Asia and try to become a global company, it must also face up to the difficulties it will inevitably encounter as a global company.

Sea had about $7.8 billion in cash on hand as of June 2022, while it posted a net loss of more than $900 million in a quarter. At this rate, it will burn through more than $3 billion a year, meaning its reserves could be spent in as little as two years. Sea’s stock price has fallen 84% from its peak, and the difficulty of raising funds has risen sharply.

The turbulent external environment, continuous losses, and simultaneous global expansion in multiple regions are unwise. For Sea, survival is more important than anything else.

This article is reprinted from: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1330
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