Sea Limited, the Singapore-based group behind Shopee, the fintech arm Monee and the games studio Garena, reported first-quarter revenue of US$7.1 billion, up 46.6 per cent on a year earlier. The detail that made the quarter, reported on 12 May, is that all three businesses grew at once. For most of Sea's life as a public company, one engine has carried the others.
Shopee sets a record
The e-commerce arm booked 4.0 billion gross orders and US$37.3 billion in gross merchandise value, a quarterly high. More telling for profitability, the take rate — the slice of each sale Shopee keeps — rose to 13.7 per cent from 12.3 per cent a year earlier. That 140-basis-point gain reflects more advertising and paid merchant services flowing through the platform, the higher-margin layer Sea has been building toward.
Monee and Garena pull their weight
Monee, the digital-financial-services unit, grew its loan book about 70 per cent year on year to US$9.9 billion while keeping non-performing loans steady at 1.1 per cent. Lending fast without letting bad debt climb is the hard trick in consumer fintech, and the steady ratio is the number a credit analyst checks first. Garena, long the group's swing factor, delivered what management called its strongest quarter in five years on renewed engagement in Free Fire.
The guidance
Sea expects Shopee's full-year GMV to grow about 25 per cent, and full-year adjusted earnings for the e-commerce segment to hold at no lower than 2025 in absolute terms, per Seeking Alpha. The message is growth without trading away the profitability the company spent two hard years earning.
Why it matters for the region
Sea is the closest thing South-east Asia has to a homegrown platform champion, operating across Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand and its home market. A quarter where commerce, credit and gaming all compound at once is a marker for the region's digital economy, not only for one company's shareholders. It also raises the competitive bar for Grab, GoTo and the Chinese platforms pushing into the same markets.
