Sea Group Limited

It's, it's a much smaller position now because I think it's fairly valued at least, but who's to say it couldn't get expensive.

I mean, I think they really are kind of in a dominant position and Yeah, I just think all those companies have been – I think MercadoLibre and Sea Limited still have a chance to – it's always margins with these companies.

So I think slow and steady wins the race.

I hate to be sort of cliched here, but that's why I like to toast because it's as boring as it gets, but it's like they're just blocking and tackling.

Facebook co-founder Eduardo Severin lost more than $10 billion, although he remains Singapore's richest person.

Meanwhile, the founders of Singapore-based tech company Sea Limited lost nearly $6 billion combined.

A 25-year-old British national has been jailed for eight weeks and fined $2,800 after causing a disturbance at Changi Airport while drunk.

Arut Chalwan Karnan had drunk an entire 700ml bottle of whiskey before heading to the airport on July 20 for his scoot flight to Malaysia.

So let me show you what actually happened and what it costs.

I'm Kevin Brock, and this is Sea of Startups.

Real, raw, relatable, and today, a little bit of tough love.

So let us start with the good news, because it is genuinely good.

Proof over hype every single time in my book.

I'm Kevin Brocklin.

This has been Sea of Startups.

If this made you rethink a slide in your deck, good.

I said right at the beginning, we need cash flow to come off these businesses.

And Forrest Lee, who runs Shopee and runs Sea, had already turned Garena from a loss-making business into a profit-making business and a very profitable business.

So he knows how to do that.

There was a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in these loss-making businesses called the path to profitability.

Real quick, MercadoLibre, uh, South America, e-commerce, and fintech company, reported earnings.

The big story with what's going on with Meli right now is they've basically consciously decided to invest more into the business to defend themselves against potential competition, uh, or existing competition, mostly from Sea Limited Shopee in Brazil.

But also because they see a bigger opportunity in expanding their fintech business to a much wider audience.

And in that expansion of the fintech business, they're seeing really good, uh, retention basically, and sort of a flywheel spinning between the fintech and the e-commerce business.

And so their margins used to be much higher.

They're lower now.

That's because they're investing in free shipping to spawn a lot more commerce activity, get more of these lower-end buyers that were kind of being soaked up by Sea, get them into the Meli ecosystem.

Now, using a lot of, uh, credit, credit cards, uh, other, uh, sort of fintech pushes to get more users into their ecosystem because they've seen that once a user...

No branches, banking through an app, competitive savings rates and rewards and, in some cases, the backing of some very large technology ecosystems, right? But several years on, digital banking isn't new anymore, and traditional banks have become increasingly digital themselves.

So here's the interesting question now: What does a digital bank have to offer when simply being digital isn't enough? And as these banks move beyond attracting customers towards building deeper relationships and sustainable businesses, what have we actually learned about the model? Joining me live in the studio is Natalia Go, CEO of MariBank Group, the digital banking arm of Sea Limited, and Sea is of course the Singapore-headquartered technology group behind businesses including Shopee and SeaMoney.

Natalia, a very warm welcome to Industry Insight.

Thank you, Lynn.

Okay.

Okay, okay.

Now let me bring Sea into this.

Yes.