Free Fire, the flagship game of Garena, Sea’s digital entertainment division.
As with any investment, your capital is at risk.
It is sundown in central Java. Zarah, an Indonesian merchant, props up her phone on a stack of shoeboxes and taps “Go live”. She starts with a smile, a wave and a quick poll for her few hundred viewers: floral or plain?
The audience responds, hearts drift up the screen as she then styles a floral scarf. Questions flow from viewers asking about size, shade and designs, with Zarah responding in real time. Then, a burst of confetti appears, followed by a spin-the-wheel mini-game, bestowing winners with vouchers that expire in seconds.
Orders flow through the chat without buyers ever leaving the stream. Some pay upfront, while others do so in instalments, which are approved instantly. This is a weekday evening on Shopee Live in Indonesia, where shopping is part gameshow, part community event.
From that digital stream, the journey becomes physical. An in-house logistics network stitches together a vast archipelago of islands spanning more than 5,000km from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific. It starts later that evening with a moped courier arriving at Zarah’s neighbourhood collection point to take her packages.
A truck later transports them across Java. A plane, sometimes a boat, bridges the islands. The final leg of the journey again falls to a moped driver for whom ‘behind the mango tree, second lane past the blue gate’ is a real instruction. Postcodes and house numbers cannot be assumed. The real trick isn’t just speed. It’s repeatable, low-cost precision in messy reality.
For the company that makes this all possible, complexity is not a bug to be tolerated. For Sea, stitching together complexity across south-east Asia at low cost is a powerful edge.
Scottish Mortgage invested in Sea in early 2024. It operates across south-east Asia, Taiwan and Brazil – dynamic, underserved markets where mobile is the default platform and infrastructure is uneven. What distinguishes Sea is not just its fast-growing end markets but an uncanny ability born out of ambition, adaptability and experimentation to deliver multiple acts. Today, Sea has three large acts playing out at a continental scale.
Act 1
Gaming: designed for the phones people actually own
The first act was not shopping but gaming. Sea started by publishing and then creating games designed for the phones that most people around the world actually own: modest Android handsets on patchy bandwidth. File sizes, modes and art are optimised for low processing and memory requirements. Crucial too is that content is localised, so ‘skins’ (outfits and other customisations for in-game characters and objects), ‘emotes’ (the animated gestures or expressions players’ avatars use) and ‘events’ (in-game activities) feel native to Jakarta as well as Manila, Hanoi and Kuala Lumpur.
Collaborations – from regional music to football tie-ins and holiday specials – keep its flagship title Free Fire fresh, boosting its longevity. The result: Free Fire has become one of the world’s most downloaded games, generating billion-dollar cash flows that have funded later acts. Gaming taught Sea how to keep a giant user base engaged with a constant cadence of lightweight, rewarding interactions – the very language of today’s ecommerce feeds.
Act 2
Ecommerce: a bazaar, not a catalogue
Success in gaming made management rich. But the company’s founder, Forrest Li, recalled to me how he and his colleagues decided in their mid-30s that retiring to lie on the beach did not appeal. Instead, they leveraged their gaming success into a second act in an ecommerce arm known as Shopee. Unlike others at the time, this was not a clone of Amazon. Shopee grew up mobile-first and entertainment by default.
Today, livestreams, chat, mini-games and a personalised feed make the app feel more like a vibrant bazaar than a catalogue. Discovery and advertising are woven into that rhythm, not bolted on.
The focus was also on low-priced items and categories to match the price-conscious consumers it served. Over time, Shopee internalised logistics, which has both pushed down costs per parcel and improved speed, providing it with a hard infrastructure edge.
The fruits of this are clear. In south-east Asia, Shopee’s market share is about 50 per cent, above Amazon’s share in the US.
In Brazil, it’s taken second place after MercadoLibre, pushing Amazon into third. Yet it is still early days, with ecommerce penetration less than half that of China in the regions in which Shopee operates. Growing monetisation and advertising should also further boost revenue and profitability over time.
Act 3
Financial services: from checkout to credit platform
This evolved from the ecommerce checkout. Sea built payments first: digital wallets that enable everyday transactions on Shopee. Then it added buy-now-pay-later credit that appeared exactly at the point of purchase.
From there, the scope widened: off-platform cash loans for consumers and working capital loans for merchants like Zarah, which are increasingly funded by local deposits at SeaBank. Risk is kept in check with short repayment periods, conservative limits and dense behavioural data on who buys, returns and pays on time on the shopping platform.
The data advantage is huge in a region where many still do not have a bank account. Credit, savings, investments and insurance all become possible. What began as a way to help users pay now has the potential to become the most valuable financial services operation in south-east Asia.
Competition is, of course, relentless. ByteDance’s TikTok has taken the number two spot in ecommerce across south-east Asia, leveraging its short-form video platform. Coupang is attempting to grow in the Taiwanese ecommerce market. In Brazil, MercadoLibre leads by a significant margin. Yet this isn’t purely zero-sum: segments differ, and credible competitors help grow the market.
Scottish Mortgage’s advantage is that our investments and relationships provide access across these players, allowing us to triangulate between them. Our investments in Ant Group and MercadoLibre enabled us to understand the potential of Sea’s financial services operation earlier than would have been the case otherwise.
Being truly global and talking to both private and public companies allow more dots to be connected.
It is not possible to rule out a fourth act, but these three should be plenty. In gaming, Sea generates cash flows and perfects habit loops and fresh content. Ecommerce borrows those mechanics to keep viewers engaged and buying: those purchases provide data to underwrite credit. Credit boosts the purchasing power of consumers on the platform, allowing merchants to expand faster.
The scale of all this enables it to run its own logistics operations, which become more efficient as delivery densities rise. Data, users and capital reinforce each other across these businesses.
For Scottish Mortgage, this is the pattern of many outliers with capabilities compounding across multiple acts, not just a single growth-to-maturity S-curve. For Forrest Li, the mercurial founder, there is a possible path to a trillion-dollar business. I certainly wouldn’t want to bet against him.
Sea Limited is also owned by The Monks Investment Trust and Pacific Horizon Investment Trust
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