Sea Limited (NYSE:SE) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Yanjun Wang: Thank you, Alicia. In terms of short-term margin targets, so different business units are different. Of course, for Garena, our focus now is continue to stabilize our user base and providing better experience to our users on our core games at the same time, continue to improve our profit margins. I mean at more than 47% EBITDA margin, we believe that we are still very high compared to the industry average. And we have shown ability to achieve very high margin for the business before, and we’ll continue to be very — watching our margin closely to improve our efficiency. In terms of digital financial services, I think we — still it’s very early stage. We just turned a profit full in the first quarter, and we’ll continue to expand the overall the service offerings to our users so that we can reach a broader user base and offer more diversified services and — but the focus on that business is more on the quality and long-term sustainability and trust building with our users.

It’s not to us at this stage a speed-driven business. We believe building a solid foundation, leveraging the ecosystem advantages manages it has being part of a Sea ecosystem with the strong synergies with Shopee, in particular, is the most important thing at this stage. And for Shopee, it’s going to be a market-by-market dynamic assessment. All our Asian markets are currently EBITDA-positive. Now Brazil market, which is relatively new, we’ve seen significant profitability improvement while we continue to see growth — relatively stronger growth there compared to our Asia markets. So I think it’s going to be a highly dynamic process for each market at any period of time, we’ll assess the market condition the natural user growth rates, the competitive landscape, our operational cost structure in that market, and then we’ll assess what would be a reasonable profit margin we could achieve in that market versus the growth we want to achieve in the market.

As I said before, it’s not necessarily a trade-off. If the business is — the growth is driven only by investment in sales marketing, it’s not a good business we want to be in to begin with. And the fact that we’re able to cut sales and marketing by more than 50% while sustaining GMV already itself a strong testament of the our ecosystem capability. So it doesn’t necessarily go against each other. We don’t necessarily think that growth and profitability need to be a trade-off. We do think that while we some of our measures that we are focused on such as cost structure improvement, logistics improvement, seller management, better consumer services and better buyer experience all will improve the efficiency of any investment we make into our ecosystem and also improve the profitability as well as growth.

So a lot of it depends on natural growth, the macro environment, competitive landscape and our operational stage and views at any period of time in a market-by-market assessment. We don’t have a single number for Shopee as a whole, but it’s going to be a lot of bottom-up and dynamic assessment and fine-tuned operations. So that’s the trick of the business, but also, I think our range of strength in operating a highly diversified markets and with different development strategies, I think overall, we — in long run, of course, we believe in sustainable growth, which also means profitable growth for the business, and we still see this as our strong growth engine.

Operator: Our next question comes from Piyush Choudhary from HSBC. Please go ahead.