Sea Limited (SE) Earnings Call Transcript

Good morning and good evening to all, and welcome to the Sea Limited Second Quarter 2026 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] And finally, I would like to advise all participants that this call is being recorded. Thank you. I'd now like to welcome Mr. KC Ong to begin the conference. Please go ahead.

Hello everyone, and welcome to Sea's 2026 Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call. I am KC from Sea's Investor Relations team. On this call, we may make forward-looking statements, which are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties and may not be realized in the future for various reasons as stated in our press release. Also, this call includes the discussion of certain non-GAAP financial measures such as adjusted EBITDA. We believe these measures can enhance our investors' understanding of the actual cash flows of our major businesses when used as a complement to our GAAP disclosures. For a discussion of the use of non-GAAP financial measures and reconciliation with the closest GAAP measures, please refer to the section on non-GAAP financial measures in our press release. I have with me Sea's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Forrest Li; President, Chris Feng; and Chief Financial Officer, Tony Hou. Our management will share strategy and business updates, operating highlights and financial performance for the second quarter of 2026. This will be followed by a Q&A session in which we welcome any questions you have. With that, let me turn the call over to Forrest.

Hello everyone, and thank you for joining today's call. Our strong momentum from the first quarter has continued into the second. Sea generated $7.8 billion in revenue, up 48% year-on-year, and over $917 million in adjusted EBITDA. Our investments have enabled Shopee and Monee to continue to strengthen our market leadership while improving our user penetration. Many of our initiatives unit economics continue to improve, a testament to our strong financial discipline and operational efficiency. We will continue to invest prudently in serving more users and serving them better, broadening our foundation for profitable growth into the future. With that, let me take you through each business' performance. Starting with Shopee. Shopee continued its strong momentum into the second quarter. GMV grew 28% year-on-year, marking eight consecutive quarters of sequential growth, and we again achieved new highs in gross order volume and revenue. We generated an adjusted EBITDA of more than $250 million during the second quarter. Our improving operational efficiency and growing scale have strengthened our unique economics. We can now profitably serve a wider range of users, enabling us to lean further into user acquisition. We have engaged and reengaged several user groups through brand awareness campaigns, expanding our content channels and broadening our logistics offerings to cater to different preferences. This drove remarkable new buyer growth in the second quarter. Average monthly new active buyers grew more than 35% year-on-year, a significant acceleration from previous quarters. Average monthly active buyers increased 18% year-on-year and overall buyer engagement also continued to improve with purchase frequency increasing by 8% year-on-year. Our monetization strengthened further in the second quarter. Ad revenue was up more than 70% and ad take rate improved by over 90 basis points year-on-year. We continued to make advertising simpler and smarter for sellers. For example, pairing ads with vouchers that are personalized to buyers to increase purchase conversion and improve the efficiency of sellers' ad spend. Ad adoption and spend continued to improve across our seller base. The number of ad paying sellers rose around 45%, while average ad spend per seller increased more than 15% year-on-year. Our operational priorities remain consistent, improving price competitiveness, service quality and our content ecosystem. To keep strengthening our execution across these priorities, we continued to deepen our structural moats across logistics, ShopeeVIP and content. Strong logistics capabilities continue to be a key contributor to Shopee's reputation for excellent service. We continue to make delivery faster and more reliable across a wider product assortment in the second quarter. Instant and the same-day delivery gained strong traction as we captured more LED purchases. Our instant service initiative can now deliver in as fast as 1 hour in urban areas. We continue to expand our presence in high-frequency categories such as groceries and pharmacy items to serve our buyers better. Other volumes using instant delivery rates grew around 80% year-on-year in initial while cost per order fell by around 20%, driven by economies of scale and efficiency gains. Beyond delivery, we also made good progress in fulfillment with other volumes up more than 20% quarter-on-quarter. Fulfillment benefits both sides of our marketplace. Sellers offload operational complexity and scale more efficiently while buyers enjoy faster, more reliable delivery. In some markets, more than 60% of our fulfilled parcels arrive the next day meaningfully higher than the platform average. The gains are especially noticeable in places where geography makes delivery challenging. For example, in Mindanao, a mountain region in the Philippines, fulfillment has buyer waiting time by 1 to 3 days, buyers can feel the difference. These teams have converted to fulfillment saw more than a 20% customers uplift in orders on average in Southeast Asia. Second, our ShopeeVIP program continued to scale strongly. Now live across Asia and Brazil, total membership exceeded 15 million at the end of June, up 25% from the previous quarter. Across Asia, VIP members contributed 24% of GMV in the quarter. Average monthly retention remained strong at around 80% and members continue to show higher engagement spending meaningfully more after subscribing. In Brazil, early adoption has been encouraging since our April launch with membership already surpassing 1 million. Beyond buyers, we are seeing encouraging support among both Shopee sellers and external partners for our ShopeeVIP program. We have brought the number of benefits across travel, dining and entertainment, improving the program's value proposition. More sellers and partners have come on board to co-fund benefits, demonstrating the value they see in engaging our ShopeeVIP buyer base. This has helped improve the program's unique economics in Asia. Third, we have continued to improve our content ecosystem to make product discovery more engaging. Orders from live streaming and short-form video grew more than 50% year-on-year, accounting for more than 25% of physical good orders in Southeast Asia. Unit economics also improved sequentially as we further optimize our marketing spend. We have deepened our relationships with YouTube and Meta to drive order growth. Shopee affiliate orders generated by linked creators on Facebook increased by more than 85% quarter-on-quarter, with Facebook Reels proving to be a very popular channel to drive purchases. We have now extended our Instagram collaboration to all eight of our core markets, and we are seeing promising early results from Indonesia, the first market where we launched the partnership. I'm particularly happy with our progress in Brazil, which remain our fastest scaling market in the second quarter. We once again outpaced the broader market on GMV growth supported by increases in active buyers, purchase frequency and average basket size. We continue to invest in and optimize our end-to-end logistics capabilities, expanding our network while ramping up utilization. We improved the delivery speed, reducing average buyer waiting time by 15% year-on-year and doubled our penetration of fulfillment orders year-on-year. These logistics improvements are also supporting our expansion upmarket. We onboarded nearly 500 new official brands during the quarter, while GMV from Shopee Mall sellers more than doubled year-on-year. We still see significant headroom for growth in Brazil, and we will continue to invest in this market in a disciplined and profitable manner. I'm pleased that Shopee has delivered a strong first half of 2026. With this solid momentum we are optimistic that Shopee will achieve the milestone of $1 billion in adjusted EBITDA for the full year. Next, moving to Monee. Monee delivered another great quarter with continued strong growth in both revenue and adjusted EBITDA. Credit remained the primary driver of growth. Our loan book reached $11.1 billion at the end of June, up 52% year-on-year. Asset quality remained stable with our 90-day NPL ratio at 1.0%. The Philippines has become our feed market with a loan book exceeding $1 billion. We continue to expand our credit business on three fronts: acquiring new users; deepening our relationships with existing users; and expanding our credit use cases. One key enabler of our credit business growth has been the ongoing advances we have made in our credit risk capabilities. Our latest risk models are pretrained on our broad set of behavioral and transactional data across our ecosystem using transformer architecture similar to those following today's large language models. The model learns from the full sequence of the users' actions over time, capturing richer context around how customers interact with our platform. Recent enhancements to our underwriting models have helped lead approval rates by around 10% when compared to previous models while maintaining a similar level of risk. This further reinforces the scale of our ecosystem as a durable advantage. To further strengthen this capability, we are also drawing on more external data sources to better assess users who are newer to our ecosystem. For instance, through partnerships with local mobile operators in Indonesia and Open Finance data in Brazil. We have also used AI to build tools to efficiently verify a diverse range of user submitted income documents across markets, languages and formats. Review time reduced by around 95% while maintaining a very high level of accuracy, letting us respond to credit limit requests from users almost instantly. Supported by this improvement in risk underwriting, we have been pushing harder on new user acquisition. We have found that many users begin using SPayLater for convenience and subsequently generate more value through repeat transactions, installment conversion and adoption of our other credit products. So we have broadened the rollout of 1 month interest-free SPayLater loans, giving forward the option to either settle their balances within the month or easily convert purchases into interest-bearing installments. Similarly, we have been more widely offering promotional interest rates for first-time personal cash loans. Taken together, these efforts contributed to strong new user growth during the quarter. We added around 5.3 million unique first-time borrowers and our active credit users grew around 34% year-on-year to over $40 million at the end of the quarter. We also saw deeper user engagement, average loans outstanding per user grew around 20% year-on-year. Shopee SPayLater has continued to scale well, driven by integration with national QR payment infrastructure and continued merchant onboarding. By the end of the quarter, Shopee accounted for over 20% of our total SPayLater portfolio with this figure as high as 35% in some markets. In Thailand, we are testing a new product to ShopeePay unlimited card. It lets users pay with their SPayLater balance at any merchant that accepts our payments, further expanding at a later use cases. The stand-alone ShopeePay app remains a key pillar of our strategy to grow Monee beyond Shopee, serving as a one-stop platform for user payments, credit, insurance and broader financial needs. In the second quarter, monthly transacting users on the map more than doubled. The ShopeePay app is currently live in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam, and we will launch a similar stand-alone app in Brazil soon. In summary, Monee delivered another strong quarter with broad-based growth across our products and markets, the advances in our risk capabilities are compounding. Each improvement helps us serve more users serve them better and reach further beyond Shopee. We are still at the early stage of growth. Only a fraction of the users across our ecosystem are using Monee's financial products today and the credit penetration remains low across our markets. This gives us great confidence in Monee's long-term growth and earnings potential. Next, turning to Garena. Garena delivered another strong quarter with bookings growing 15% year-on-year with profitability remaining healthy and growing well year-on-year. Free Fire anchored this strong performance, now in ninth next year, it is still expanding its reach and scale globally, continuing to draw in over 100 million average daily active users. Free Fire's longevity comes from a single discipline: we keep the experience fresh with the new game play and the content and we make it feel both local to the communities who play it and enjoyable for a global audience. A great example this quarter was Undersea Mystery, an ocean-themed campaign inspired by Songkran, Thailand's water festival. We integrated the theme in the map itself, creating a gateway into a new undersea realm. This extended battle ground gave players a fresh territory to explore and fight over and the opportunity to hunt for powerful gear hidden in the hydro zone and fishing pond across the map. This continued reinvention of the core game play keep players engaged over time. We also rode the World Cup wave to build excitement and engagement with our players. Our Fire kickoff campaign wove football into the map itself, turning part of it into a football field. Eliminated players were sent to a one-on-one football showdown for chance at redoing the match. And the new football form that players turned themselves into a football to speed across the map and pull off surprise plays. The campaign also resonated well beyond games, the original campaign song, Booyah Olé, became a standard organic driver of social engagement, generating over 350 million social media views. I'm also very excited about what lies ahead for our portfolio. We announced the two mobile games, both built on strong globally recognized IP, Palworld Online is an open-world multiplayer survival adventure game developed and published by Garena and their license from Pocketpair, and Monster Hunter Outlanders is a survival hunting action game developed by Tencent based on Capcom's iconic franchise. Taken together, these titles show how Garena expanding into new genres, strengthening our development and publishing capabilities and deepening our relationships with top global partners. In summary, Garena delivered another strong quarter. Free Fire is still proving itself as an evergreen franchise, and we continue to work towards diversifying our portfolio. We remain committed to delivering the high-quality experiences our players know us for. In conclusion, this quarter's strong results underscore both our financial discipline and the strength of our business. This promising momentum gives us greater confidence for the rest of the year. With that, I invite Tony to discuss our financials.

Thank you, Forrest, and thanks to everyone for joining the call. For Sea overall, total GAAP revenue increased 48% year-on-year to $7.8 billion in the second quarter of 2026. This was primarily driven by growth in Shopee and Monee. Our total adjusted EBITDA was up by 11% year-on-year to $917 million in the second quarter of 2026. On Shopee, gross orders increased 27% year-on-year to $4.2 billion in the second quarter of 2026, and GMV increased by 28% year-on-year to $38.3 billion in the second quarter of 2026. Our second quarter GAAP revenue of $5.6 billion included GAAP marketplace revenue of $4.9 billion, up 49% year-on-year, and GAAP product revenue of $0.7 billion. Within GAAP marketplace revenue, core marketplace revenue, mainly consisting of transaction-based fees and advertising revenues was $4.3 billion, up 66% year-on-year. Value-added services revenue, mainly consisting of revenues related to logistic services was $0.7 billion. Shopee adjusted EBITDA was up by 12% year-on-year to $255 million in the second quarter of 2026. Non-GAAP revenue was up by 59% year-on-year to $1.4 billion in the second quarter of 2026. Adjusted EBITDA was up by 13% year-on-year to $288 million in the second quarter of 2026. As of the end of June, our consumer and SME loans principal outstanding reached $11.1 billion, up 62% year-on-year. This consists of $10 billion on book and $1.1 billion off book loans principal outstanding. Nonperforming loans past due by more than 90 days as a percentage of total consumer and SME loans was 1% at the end of the quarter. Garena bookings grew 15% year-on-year to $764 million. GAAP revenue was up by 34% year-on-year to $747 million. The growth was primarily due to the increase in our active user base and deeper paying user penetration. Garena adjusted EBITDA was up by 17% year-on-year to $430 million. Returning to our consolidated numbers. We recognized a net nonoperating income of $66 million in the second quarter of 2026 compared to a net nonoperating income of $83 million in the second quarter of 2025. We had a net income tax expense of $251 million in the second quarter of 2026 compared to net income tax expense of $144 million in the second quarter of 2025. As a result, net income was up by 11% year-on-year to $458 million.

Thank you, Forrest and Tony. We are now ready to open the call to questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Piyush Choudhary with HSBC.

Congratulations, management, on great set of results. Two questions. Firstly, on Shopee, your investments are delivering results on the growth, so can you talk a little bit about outlook for GMV growth? And are we behind peak investments as margins have improved sequentially? Is the unit economics improving across VIP and content? And should we expect Shopee margins to improve? Or there could be volatility in second half due to seasonality? That is first question. Secondly, can you give us an update on AI initiatives like last time you mentioned about AI shopping assistant for buyers, how have been the pilots? And for sellers on your platform, what initiatives you have taken and benefits observed?

I will take this question. If you look at the Shopee outlook for GMV growth, we still see quite good growth in Q2 as we shared in the opening. We still see the trend continues in the coming quarter. The growth has been doing well across our markets in South Asia, Taiwan and also Brazil. If we look forward for the full year, we remain well on track and confident of achieving our full year growth outlook of around 25%. And that said, we want to make sure that we also anticipate the potential ForEx headwind as well. As you can observe that many of our market has weaker currency against U.S. dollars. Q3 and Q4 also have a higher GMV base. But again, we still believe that we are able to achieve the guidance we gave before of around 25%. In terms of investment we are doing for the few initiatives that we shared before on the VIP, on the fulfillment, on our logistics, et cetera. In general, we see our unit economics have been improving quarter-on-quarter. I think for our content businesses, which we shared that we did an investment for a period of time. If you look at the unit economic has been as good as the platform already. The new initiative, although we're still in the investment phase, but in general, we do see a positive trend on the economic improvement. And also in general, what we are doing is less very CapEx-heavy investment even with the fulfillment, we usually take a CapEx-light approach that we don't own the for fulfillment centers. But usually, we rent the place with relatively light CapEx to enable the growth there. In terms of the margins, I think we shared our full year ambition of achieving $1 billion in adjusted EBITDA. For the AI initiatives, we are doing quite a lot of work over the past few quarters, both on buyer and seller side, as you mentioned. We are launching the IM assistance for sellers in quite a few of the markets. Essentially, instead of the seller talk to key account managers, the IMs as we call it. There is a digital IM that they can talk to, which can help them to answer many questions or many analysis they want to do with their shops. This is also 24 hours available, of course, compared to key account manager, usually not available 24 hours by 7. I think just one of the examples that we're working with the sellers among many others. On the buyer side, we spend a lot of effort on both helping the ads have better conversions, which reflects in our ad take rate improvement over time, but also just general conversion for our search recommendations. We have been rolling out our new GR algorithm, generative algorithm for recommendation and search, which gives us a meaningful improvement on the conversion rate that we observed. We're also doing pilot work on AIGC on content. If you look at our platforms, we have a lot more content can be generated by AI now, which can be used to do a personalized targeting for our buyers to improve the conversion as well, and many other work that we are doing. I'm just sharing with you on top of my mind.

Your next question comes from the line of Alicia Yap with Citigroup.

Congratulations on the strong set of results. I wanted to follow up a little bit on the e-commerce Shopee question. So can management elaborate a little bit the outperformance this quarter and also the profitability trend for Brazil, Taiwan and Southeast Asia and also the latest competitive landscape there? And then on your guidance. I know that you mentioned the 25% is unchanged for the GMV growth, so in the case that if the GMV were to further exceed the guided growth rate, is it suggested that there is also further upside on the EBITDA for the second half? And then lastly, on the fulfillment investment cycle. Just wondering where are we in the time frame? Are we getting closer to what we wanted to invest? Or are we still in the early stage of the investment cycle for the fulfillment center?

Across the market, we see relatively good performance, both on growth and profitability. But I don't think it's a single market trend, but relatively across the market. Regarding the competitive situations, we do observe the competitive situation to be relatively stable at this point in time. And we are able to maintain our market share. In certain markets, we are able to gain market shares as well over the quarters for South Asia and Taiwan. For Brazil, we also observed that our growth is well above the market growth levels. And we believe we're growing faster than our close competitors as well there. Regarding the balance between growth and EBITDA, it's always a question on what's the best balance between the growth and EBITDA, and I don't think there is simple answer there. I think something we always observe both on how much we can optimize internally and also look at how fast is the market growing, and of course, look at the competitive landscape to do this balancing. At this point in time, we have been seeing the competitive situation to be relatively stable, as I shared. So the main driver of how the balancing work will lie on how we see the market growth rate look like in the rest of the year and how much we can improve our efficiency internally for this. For the fulfillment, we believe there's still quite a lot of room for us to improve, to further penetrate on the fulfillment businesses. I think right now, both in South Asia and Brazil and Taiwan, we are still ramping up the fulfillment sizes. For example, I think we shared that our fulfillment grew more than 20% quarter-on-quarter. In quite a few markets, it's more than double-digit already of our businesses. But still, if you compare the size of our procurement with some of the other players in our market, especially in Brazil, or compared with the sizes of the peers in other markets, if you look at the few players with fulfillment businesses and marketplace, we're still much smaller as the size compared to them. And with the good benefits we see from a fulfillment both on reducing the speed of deliveries and enhance the buyer conversion and also reduce the effort of sellers selling our platform, we do believe this is a good investment we are taking for the -- for our platform. And also, as I shared in the earlier questions, our fulfillment economy has been improving quarter-on-quarter, driven both by the fact we are able to optimize the cost structure. I think it's a learning process and also just take time to optimize the operations just in general. That's one. Also, as we grow the scale with more and more seller joining the fulfillment businesses, it's actually, we have better scale advantage on that. And number three is also because there are more and more buyers recognize the fulfillment businesses that we are offering. This gives us a better economics over time. Another thing that's important to point out is that we are also doing a lot more integration between fulfillment and SPX. So essentially to reduce the frictions between how the warehouse -- the items in our warehouse moves across the entire value chain. So it's -- so we can realize the cost synergies and cost benefits by running both the warehouse and the logistics together. And all these things help us to build the fulfillment businesses and helping us to gain the advantage of the overall platform. Yes, again, we run fulfillment business in relatively light CapEx fashion that we don't own the land, we don't own the warehouses. When we start a new fulfillment center, we do relatively light CapEx to enable that. We are also experimenting more automation with our fulfillment centers, which actually reduce our cost to run as well, but that's still in the early stage. We will share more when we scale more to our fulfillment centers over time.

Your next question comes from Divya Kothiyal with Morgan Stanley.

My first question is on the e-commerce side. We've noticed that both Shopee and TikTok shop have raised commissions in several ASEAN markets this year. Could you talk about how much more upside do you think there is for this? And can you confirm if ASEAN e-commerce is now profitable? And is that something that has specifically driven the guidance upgrade for e-commerce overall for this year? And my second question is on fintech. Where do you expect Monee's margins to really stabilize? We did see sales and marketing expenses continue to rise. When should we expect Monee's EBITDA growth to reaccelerate to more healthy levels? And could you maybe just talk about any guardrails we should be mindful of in terms of NPLs, provisioning, especially as you're acquiring new users.

When we look at the take rate, we look at take rates from multiple angles. I think one is how much the take rate is reinvesting to grow the ecosystem, which is very important for us to look at. That's number one. Number two is we look at how our price competitiveness is in our platform. So essentially after take rate, do we still maintain a similar gap of price leadership or not compared to the other platforms. Number three is we also look at the price of e-commerce essentially on our platform versus the offline pricing. Number four, we also look at what does it mean for sellers' profitability. I think we put all the things together in terms of consideration for the take rate. From what we observed so far, we have been saying very healthy ecosystem even with the increase of take rate. And the reason for that is that we reinvest a large part of the take rate to the ecosystem growth as well, and also that we're able to help the seller to operate online more efficiently over time with the combination of other things, our price is still very competitive, not only compared to the other marketplaces in our market, but also compared to the offline alternatives in the market. And going forward, we still see opportunities to increase our take rate, not only from commission, but also from the paid ads we have been able to penetrate more and more over time. Although you can argue that the fixed commissions probably has -- the pace of the fixed commission increase probably will be less than we observed before. But again, there is still room for us to increase the overall take rate by both helping the sellers to operate more efficient, but also helping the sellers grow their volumes by reinvesting part of the things to the ecosystem and also increase the conversion potential from the buyer side. With all the things together I think we're able to grow this even more over time. On the Monee margin question, if you look at individual countries of the Monee businesses, if you look at the EBITDA over the balance -- over the outstanding ratios, it's been relatively consistent. Our NPL has been relatively stable as well over time. I think the -- but typically, when we operate, we look at by product, by countries, by segment. And the shift of the retail assets is primarily driven by the mix of these things. For example, the certain countries, for example, let's say, in Thailand or in Malaysia, which is a later country that grows more than the previous countries, the overall ROA is slightly lower, so which kind of like we mix together, it reflects to the overall numbers. For example, some of the off-Shopee SPL lending growth, which is quite meaningful, more than 20% of the total SPL already, as Forrest shared in the opening, has naturally lower ROA compared to the on-Shopee SPLs. For example, we have been trying to penetrate more to prime segment users, which naturally have slightly lower interest rate, et cetera, and all those growth are intentional. And as you observed from the numbers that it does require some investment, sometimes when we grow into the segment and sometimes, it does mean that we are able to grow the outstanding a lot more, but we're slightly lower ROA compared to the previous segment or countries or products we focus on. So we actually see this as a positive movement rather than the negative view out of this. Our guardrail is very simple. We want to maintain stable NPL for the segment, the product, the countries when we look at it. And when we grow new segments, new product, new countries, we wanted to make sure it brings a positive return of the assets to us. That's why as a consequence, we always see that our absolute EBITDA, absolute profit from Monee has been growing quarter-on-quarter.

Your next question comes from John Choi with Daiwa.