Sea paid for its shopping mall with video games. The Singapore company started as Garena, a platform for online games across Southeast Asia, and used that cash to build Shopee, a mobile marketplace, and a payments arm. When it listed in New York in October 2017, the region had hundreds of millions of people buying their first smartphones. Few of them had ever shopped online or held a credit card. Sea wanted to be where they did both for the first time.

From Garena to Shopee

Forrest Li founded Garena in Singapore in 2009 with Gang Ye and David Chen. Garena licensed popular online games and ran them for players across Southeast Asia and Taiwan. The games made money, and Li used it to start Shopee in 2015. Shopee was built for phones from day one, and it spent heavily on free shipping to win buyers. A payments business followed. Just before the IPO, the company renamed itself Sea to reflect the three businesses under one roof.

Free Fire and the Long Climb

Sea priced its American depositary shares at $15 each in October 2017 on the New York Stock Exchange. The same year, Garena released Free Fire, a mobile battle game built for cheap phones, and it became one of the most downloaded games in the world. That money kept funding Shopee as it fought rivals across the region and in Latin America. The payments arm grew into a digital bank. Sea still trades on the NYSE under the ticker SE.

Cover: Coast Scene, Reinier Nooms, called Zeeman. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for merchant ships along a coast (trade across Southeast Asia).