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Why the rise of Singapore’s tech giant Sea is making waves in Southeast Asia
- What began as a modest gaming firm has grown into a US$137 billion behemoth with e-commerce and digital payment ambitions
- Will this unicorn’s fairy tale rise have a happy ending?
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Dewey Simin Singapore
The term “unicorn”, used to describe start-ups worth more than US$1 billion, had not even been coined in 2009, when Stanford MBA graduate Forrest Li began working on his new gaming company with nearly a dozen employees – all cramped in a tiny shophouse in Singapore’s central business district.
Garena, his fledgling gaming company, kept a low-key profile, though its almost immediate success meant investment rounds and expansion plans came thick and fast.
Soon Garena outgrew its small outfit on Maxwell Road, then a move to a two-storey penthouse office beckoned.
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A decade on, Garena is now one limb of the gargantuan Sea Group.
With a market capitalisation of an eye-watering US$137 billion, Sea is bigger than Singapore’s biggest bank DBS, employs 3,000 people in the island republic – its global headquarters – and has operations from China to Japan and Latin America.
Its arrival as not just a unicorn, but as one of Southeast Asia’s pre-eminent technology companies is exemplified by the real estate it now occupies: in 2019, Li opened the doors to a sprawling 244,000 sq ft complex to house staff from Shopee, now the region’s biggest e-commerce platform.
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