SEA Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
May 14, 2024

Key Takeaways

  • Shopee achieved its strongest quarter yet with Q1 gross orders up 57%, GMV up 36% and revenue up 33%, while Asia markets turned profitable with a Q1 adjusted EBITDA of USD 11 million.
  • Sea’s in-house logistics arm, XPX Express, now delivers 70% of Asian orders within three days and reduced cost per order by 15% in Asia (23% in Brazil), enabling new services like guaranteed delivery and faster returns.
  • SeaMoney’s digital financial services grew revenue 21% and adjusted EBITDA 50% year-on-year, with consumer and SME loans outstanding reaching USD 3.3 billion (up 29%) and NPLs stable at 1.4%.
  • Garena returned to growth with bookings up 11% and Free Fire MAUs up 24% year-on-year, driven by frequent content updates and interactive features, making it the most downloaded mobile game globally in Q1.
  • Consolidated Q1 GAAP revenue rose 23% to USD 3.7 billion and adjusted EBITDA was USD 401 million, while net loss was USD 23 million, keeping Sea on track to meet its full-year guidance.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
SEA Q1 2024
00:00 / 00:00

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Operator

Good morning and good evening to all, and welcome to the Sea Limited First Quarter 2024 Results Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press the star one again. For operator assistance throughout the call, please press star zero. And finally, I would like to advise all participants that this call is being recorded. Thank you. I'd now like to welcome Mr. MC Koh to begin the conference. Please go ahead.

MC Koh
MC Koh
Director of Investor Relations at Sea Limited

Hello everyone, and welcome to Sea's 2024 first quarter earnings conference call. I'm MC, Sea's Investor Relations Director. On this call, we may make forward-looking statements which are inherently subject to risk and uncertainties and may not be realized in the future for various reasons, as stated in our press release. Also, this call includes a discussion of certain non-GAAP financial measures such as adjusted EBITDA. We believe these measures can enhance our investors' understanding of the actual cash flows of our major businesses when used as a complement to our GAAP disclosures. For a discussion of the use of non-GAAP financial measures and reconciliation with the closest GAAP measures, please refer to the section on non-GAAP financial measures in our press release. I have with me Sea's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Forrest Li; President, Chris Feng; and Chief Financial Officer, Tony Hou.

MC Koh
MC Koh
Director of Investor Relations at Sea Limited

Our management will share strategy and business updates, operating highlights, and financial performance for the first quarter of 2024. This will be followed by a Q&A session in which we welcome any questions you have. With that, let me turn the call over to Forrest.

Forrest Li
Forrest Li
Chairman and CEO at Sea Limited

Hello everyone, and thank you for joining today's call. I'm pleased to share that we are kicking off 2024 with a strong quarter. All our three businesses have delivered solid growth with an improved profit profile. The macro environment in the past few years has been challenging. Many of you have been with us through this journey. Going through this period has made us leaner, fitter, and savvier. While we will always face new challenges, we are now much more confident of our ability to weather headwinds well and adapt quickly to changing environments. With that, let me take you through each business performance. Starting with e-commerce, we are pleased to report that Shopee delivered strong growth this quarter, achieving its highest-ever quarterly orders, GMV, and revenue. In the first quarter, on a year-on-year basis, gross orders were up 57%, GMV was up 36%, and revenue was up 33%.

Forrest Li
Forrest Li
Chairman and CEO at Sea Limited

Unit economics has also improved. Our overall adjusted EBITDA loss narrowed to $22 million, and our Asia markets achieved a positive adjusted EBITDA of $11 million this quarter. Shopee's operational priorities for 2024 continue to be enhancing our price competitiveness, strengthening our content ecosystem, and improving service quality for our buyers. We are making good progress on all these fronts. On enhancing our price competitiveness, we continue to help sellers with upstream supply chain access to sell more easily on Shopee. On strengthening our content ecosystem, Shopee has become the largest live-streaming e-commerce platform in Indonesia based on average daily live-streaming orders in the first quarter. Live-streaming e-commerce unit economics also continued to improve quarter on quarter. On improving service quality for buyers, our integrated logistics capability has become a key differentiating factor of our service quality.

Forrest Li
Forrest Li
Chairman and CEO at Sea Limited

We have put a lot of hard work into SPX Express, and today it is one of the fastest and most intensive logistics operators in our market, greatly enhancing our customer experience. In the first quarter, about 70% of SPX Express orders in Asia were delivered within three days of order placement. Because of the scale we have achieved in our market, we have managed to steadily reduce its cost. SPX Express's cost per order decreased by 15% for Asia and 23% for Brazil year-over-year in the first quarter. Having SPX Express in the Shopee ecosystem also allows us to efficiently roll out new features that benefit our buyers, such as the On-Time Guarantee program that we launched in Southeast Asia. This program provides a guaranteed delivery time for orders, and this certainty is well appreciated by our buyers.

Forrest Li
Forrest Li
Chairman and CEO at Sea Limited

Another initiative we implemented is having Shopee directly manage the return and refund process. This has resulted in a 30% year-on-year decrease in resolution time. In the first quarter, about 45% of cases were resolved within one day. So taken together, these efforts increase operational efficiency, improve customer experience, and reinforce Shopee's reputation as a reliable shopping destination. We will continue to push more on these operational priorities in the coming quarter and year. We expect these efforts to further differentiate Shopee from its competition and bring greater value to both our buyers and sellers. Next, turning to digital financial services, we are pleased to report that SeaMoney has continued its strong growth momentum and profitability into 2024 while maintaining prudent risk management. Our efforts on user acquisition have produced significant growth in both user numbers and loan book side.

Forrest Li
Forrest Li
Chairman and CEO at Sea Limited

In the first quarter, our digital financial services revenue grew 21%, and Adjusted EBITDA grew 50% year-on-year. Consumer and SME loan active users, defined as those with loans outstanding by the end of the quarter, increased 42% year-on-year to more than 18 million this quarter. As of March 31st, 2024, our consumer and SME loans principal outstanding reached $3.3 billion, up 29% year-on-year and up 5% quarter-on-quarter. Credit business is currently the primary driver of SeaMoney's revenue and profit growth. Our credit business benefits from Shopee's transaction volume and user base. In addition, we are also seeing strong growth in off-Shopee loans, which include cash loans and off-Shopee SPayLater consumption loans. By the end of the first quarter, off-Shopee loans accounted for over 40% of our total consumer and SME loans outstanding.

Forrest Li
Forrest Li
Chairman and CEO at Sea Limited

Going forward, we see further upside to improve our off-Shopee penetration across different markets as we continue to grow. As we scale up our credit business, we continue to maintain a prudent approach to risk management. We generally begin by granting low credit limit, short tenure loans to users to build their credit history. For users with good track records, we gradually increase the credit limit, loan tenure, and credit product offering. As we gain more users and more data, we continuously fine-tune the risk model for each market. This allows us to grow our business while maintaining good risk control. Non-performing loans past due by more than 90 days as a percentage of total consumer and SME loans remain stable at 1.4%. We anticipate further growth for our digital financial services business throughout the year.

Forrest Li
Forrest Li
Chairman and CEO at Sea Limited

As we healthily grow our user base, we will be able to offer a broader set of financial services to meet our users' needs in the future. Finally, turning to our digital entertainment business, we are pleased to share that Garena is back to positive growth with bookings up 11% year-over-year. This was led by Free Fire's strong performance across markets. In the first quarter, Free Fire's average MAU increased 24% year-over-year. Our operational priorities for Free Fire will remain consistent in 2024, improving user acquisition, engagement, and retention. We continue to introduce play modes, redesign features, and launch new content at a high frequency, allowing Free Fire to sustain high player engagement with its huge user base. In January, we launched Chaos, a major version update allowing players to vote for key events in the game setting. This interactive feature has made Chaos highly successful.

Forrest Li
Forrest Li
Chairman and CEO at Sea Limited

In April, we launched the Mechadrake version update, allowing players to team up to combat a mechanical monster in addition to the usual PvP gameplay. Our constant efforts to understand users' needs, address key issues from a product perspective, and frequently introduce fresh and exciting content are paying off. In its seventh year, Free Fire is still one of the largest mobile games in the world by user scale and remains highly effective in attracting new users. According to Sensor Tower, Free Fire was the most downloaded mobile game globally in the first quarter. Given this track record of being able to sustain and grow Free Fire's massive global user base, we are confident of building Free Fire into an evergreen franchise. To conclude, we have a clear roadmap for profitable growth.

Forrest Li
Forrest Li
Chairman and CEO at Sea Limited

Our results in the first quarter have given us a strong start to 2024, and we are well on track to deliver our full-year guidance. With that, I will invite Tony to discuss our financials.

Tony Hou
Tony Hou
CFO at Sea Limited

Thank you, Forrest, and thanks to everyone for joining the call. For Sea overall, total net revenue increased 23% year-over-year to $3.7 billion. This was primarily driven by GMV growth of our e-commerce business and the growth of our credit business. Our total adjusted EBITDA was $401 million in the first quarter of 2024 compared to an adjusted EBITDA of $507 million in the first quarter of 2023. On e-commerce, our first quarter net revenue of $2.7 billion included net marketplace revenue of $2.4 billion, up 33% year-over-year, and net product revenue of $0.3 billion.

Tony Hou
Tony Hou
CFO at Sea Limited

Within net marketplace revenue, core marketplace revenue, mainly consisting of transaction-based fees and advertising revenues, was $1.7 billion, up 47% year-on-year. Value-added services revenue, mainly consisting of revenues related to logistics services, was $0.7 billion, up 8% year-on-year. E-commerce adjusted EBITDA loss was $22 million in the first quarter of 2024 compared to an adjusted EBITDA of $208 million in the first quarter of 2023. For our Asia markets, we had an adjusted EBITDA of $11 million during the quarter compared to an adjusted EBITDA of $276 million in the first quarter of 2023. In our other markets, the adjusted EBITDA loss was $33 million, narrowing meaningfully from last year when losses were $68 million. Contribution margin loss per order in Brazil improved by nearly 88% year-on-year to reach -$0.04.

Tony Hou
Tony Hou
CFO at Sea Limited

Digital financial services net revenue was up by 21% year-on-year to $499 million. Adjusted EBITDA was up by 50% year-on-year to $149 million. Digital entertainment bookings were $512 million. Net revenue was $458 million. Adjusted EBITDA was $292 million. Returning to our consolidated numbers, we recognize a net non-operating loss of $18 million in the first quarter of 2024 compared to a net non-operating income of $23 million in the first quarter of 2023. We had a net income tax expense of $79 million in the first quarter of 2024 compared to net income tax expense of $62 million in the first quarter of 2023. As a result, net loss was $23 million in the first quarter of 2024 as compared to net income of $87 million in the first quarter of 2023.

MC Koh
MC Koh
Director of Investor Relations at Sea Limited

Thank you, Forrest and Tony. We are now ready to open the call to questions. Operator?

Operator

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press the star 1 again. In the interest of time, we will take a maximum of two questions at a time from each caller. If you wish to ask more questions, please request to join the question queue again after your first questions have been addressed. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question comes from the line of Pang Vittayaamnuaykoon of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Pang Vittayaamnuaykoon
Pang Vittayaamnuaykoon
Executive Director at Goldman Sachs

Hi, good evening, management team, and congratulations for a solid set of results. Two questions from me. Number one, how do you derive confidence that you will be able to drive sustainable growth, especially once you start to lower subsidies and move toward profitability? If your competitor decides to turn more aggressive, is there a way for you to properly react towards that? That's question number one. On number two, on gaming, given a very strong first quarter trends and results, how are you seeing trends toward second quarter and rest of the year? Can you provide color on what exactly you have done in order to derive growth, and any thought on the run rate of margin going forward as well?

Chris Feng
Chris Feng
President at Sea Limited

It's Chris here. I will take the first question on the e-commerce side. I think for us, the most important thing is to work on the long-term competitive moats for e-commerce. I think to us, as I shared in the previous call, is number one, the cost to serve, to make sure that we can serve transactions to our buyers and sellers at a lower cost. Number two is the price competitiveness of the product, to make sure that the price for the same product on our platform is always better than the other platforms. To do that, we have to work closely with the sellers, especially upper the value chains, to ensure that we can offer the lower price to the buyers always. Number three is the quality of services.

Chris Feng
Chris Feng
President at Sea Limited

As far as I mentioned quite a few times, this is one of the key areas we're focusing on, to improve not only the delivery services to our consumers, but also the return services and the customer service experiences, etc. I think all the three things will contribute to our long-term competitiveness for our e-commerce businesses. As long as we can do this well, we believe that we can deliver the better value to our buyers and sellers so we can grow better than the market that we operate in. At the same time, if you look at in the past few months, we do observe the overall market is in a more stable situation regarding to the competition point that you mentioned. And if the competitor does get more aggressive, I think we have to evaluate exactly what they did and how they did it.

Chris Feng
Chris Feng
President at Sea Limited

We will look at market by market, category by category, to evaluate what's the best response we have. But all in all, in the long term, it's the three things I mentioned earlier. The long-term competitive moat will create value for our market, to our consumers and our sellers. And we do believe that as long as we do well on that, we should be able to grow well regardless of what competitor does in the short term. I think that will bring us to a better position in the market over the years. Of course, there might be fluctuation in the short term, ups and downs, but it shouldn't change the long-term picture.

Forrest Li
Forrest Li
Chairman and CEO at Sea Limited

On the gaming side, we are very happy to see what we have achieved in the Q1, right? And it's a pretty strong result and a strong trend.

Forrest Li
Forrest Li
Chairman and CEO at Sea Limited

And we see this trend continued in Q2 so far. And in general, we are pretty optimistic about the rest of the year. I think as we shared in the last quarter, right, and we expected we're going to achieve, specifically for Free Fire, the double-digit growth, right, for the whole year. And I think the current growth and the trend is pretty much kind of a reflection of not just what we have done in the past quarter. And actually, it's reflected what we have done in the past two years, right? And we have gone through some challenges and faced some tremendous headwinds, especially after COVID, right? But I think we always believe, okay, the ambition and our aspiration is building Free Fire into an evergreen franchise.

Forrest Li
Forrest Li
Chairman and CEO at Sea Limited

So with that kind of fundamental belief, and we didn't kind of rush to monetize, think the game may kind of continually go down till it's completely gone. And we very, very much focus on all the user experience and try to fine-tune the product with a very, very much user-centric approach, right? And in the past two years, we have conducted a lot of study trips, right, and surveys, right, and go to talk to the gamers, ask them what they like and what they don't like about Free Fire, why they play and why they do not play. And the tremendous development effort is also spent on continually fine-tuning the game based on the feedback we received. I think that that is kind of what we have seen now is accumulated results through those efforts.

Forrest Li
Forrest Li
Chairman and CEO at Sea Limited

Another factor I want to mention is we kind of observed the whole market have gone through the post-COVID situation now after almost two years of that period. We've seen kind of gamers really kind of focus on the gameplay. As we shared before, during the COVID time, gamers play a lot of games, right? And there's not much other options for entertainment. And they kind of feel burned out. And that's why right after COVID, we see there's a tremendous kind of trend, right? And the gamers start to focus on other entertainment. But after another two years, I think now the whole gamer community globally, we see kind of that trend start coming back. And the gamers start kind of re-enjoy, right, the gameplay, specifically for Free Fire. And this trend is not just happening specifically on a single market.

Forrest Li
Forrest Li
Chairman and CEO at Sea Limited

Actually, it happened across all the markets. We have the game operated. In summary, I think based on what has happened in the market and what we have done for Free Fire, it's pretty much a very, very good product-market fit, right? I think we make Free Fire as an ideal product for gamers at the right timing when they kind of have a strong appetite to enjoy the gameplay. We will do all our best to continue this trend, right? Hopefully to continue to grow Free Fire, the user base, and also the monetization part as well for the rest of the year.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Alicia Yap of Citigroup. Please go ahead.

Alicia Yap
Alicia Yap
Managing Director at Citigroup

Hi. Can you hear me okay?

Forrest Li
Forrest Li
Chairman and CEO at Sea Limited

Yep.

Alicia Yap
Alicia Yap
Managing Director at Citigroup

Hello? Yeah. Okay. Hi. Good evening, management. Thanks for taking my questions. I have a question related to Shopee. Just wonder, were you willing to return to loss-making to defend your share if the competition's indeed getting more aggressive? What other levers can you further pull to allow you to defend your share while also maintaining your profitability trend? And if we look at the commission take rate, excluding the advertising, how much more room can we actually still raise the commission take rate across different countries? Thank you.

Chris Feng
Chris Feng
President at Sea Limited

On the commission take rate, generally, we still see that is a meaningful room to increase the commission take rate, although probably not as aggressive as last year in terms of increase. We also see there's a meaningful room on the ad take rate that we can look at. I think I shared this in the previous call as well, that we believe that our ad take rate is still sizably lower than the peers that we see in other markets. So there is a meaningful room there. And in terms of the competition, I think similar to the previous question that's been raised, for us, the most important thing to focus on is the long-term core competitiveness, the cost of service, the price competitiveness, the service experience. And all those things will bring us a long-term advantage for us to outcompete the competitor in the market.

Chris Feng
Chris Feng
President at Sea Limited

In the short term, we have observed a more stable competition environment in the past few months. If it changes, we will study it country by country, category by category, and evaluate what's the best way to respond to that.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Navin Killa from UBS. Please go ahead.

Navin Killa
Navin Killa
Managing Director at UBS

Hi. Good evening, and thank you for the opportunity. I actually had a couple of questions. The first one was just trying to understand the strength in the GMV for e-commerce. How much of that is attributable to seasonality, given the movement that we have seen around Lebaran this year? And therefore, I guess in the context of that, I noticed that you haven't changed your GMV guidance of high single-digit sorry, high teens growth. I'm just wondering how you think about that. And I guess the second question is on the logistics strategy. Clearly, we are starting to see some results. If you could share some numbers on the percentage of orders that are delivered on your own platform, and how do you see that number evolving in the medium to long term?

Tony Hou
Tony Hou
CFO at Sea Limited

For the GMVs, as far as shared in the opening, in Q1, we did see very strong GMV growth. Part of that is contributing by the seasonalities. This year, we have both Lunar New Year and also the Ramadan falls into Q1. And the Ramadan holiday falls into Q2 versus the different patterns in the past few years. But we don't think that's the only reasons. I think that's contributing part of reasons. Another part of reason is that all the execution work we've done in the past few quarters start to give us benefits in terms of the top-line growth. And also the bottom-line improvement, in fact, is coming in hand, actually. The exact split, it's probably hard to really split that in terms of both.

Tony Hou
Tony Hou
CFO at Sea Limited

I do emphasize on that it's not only seasonalities, but also the hard work we've been doing are giving us the benefit on both the top-line and bottom line. For the logistics, in Asia, we do deliver more than half of our orders through our own SPX Express. In Brazil, we probably have more than 70% now. We will be looking at increasing the percentage over time. I think both percentage will increase over time.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Divya Kothiyal of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Divya Kothiyal
Divya Kothiyal
Research Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Thank you very much. Good evening. My first question is on the e-commerce business. Could you talk about the drivers for the 23% quarter-on-quarter reduction that we've seen in sales and marketing expense for this segment, especially with regards to where we are in terms of unit economics for live streaming e-commerce versus marketplace? And also, if you can comment in which scenario do you think we can get back to the profitability levels of over 1% of GMV that we were able to achieve in the beginning of last year? My second question is on the DFS business. The marketing spends have remained elevated in this quarter. Could you talk about what parts of SeaMoney are these being allocated to and what kind of traction you're seeing?

Divya Kothiyal
Divya Kothiyal
Research Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Would it be fair to say that this segment's top-line growth may actually deviate from the e-commerce growth going forward as you build new cases? Thanks.

Tony Hou
Tony Hou
CFO at Sea Limited

Yes. On the e-commerce side of the questions, we do see a sizable reduction on the sales and marketing. Part of that is contributing by the better UEs from live stream that we see from Q4 to Q1. But part of that is also contributed to just general better performance in the marketplace in general. So for live streaming, just a little bit of context on that, I think we do see our live stream volumes still growing in most of our markets. But the UE actually improved significantly for various other markets. And in general, I think in the coming quarters, we will see similar patterns that our UE will continue to improve for live stream. In terms of the EBITDA per GMVs, I think we will eventually go to that. I think the number you mentioned, the 1%, I think that's a reasonable number to look at.

Tony Hou
Tony Hou
CFO at Sea Limited

In long term, I think we shared that we believe that 2%-3% is a meaningful number to look at. I think just to add a little bit on the previous question that I make sure I don't miss that, I think the question was on the guidance for the high teen growth on the GMVs for e-commerce. I think the number we see in Q1 has given us much stronger confidence in achieving that, both the high single-digit GMV growth and even in the second half of the year. We have been seeing a good trend in the latest months as well. I think we will monitor the numbers. We will update the market when we see through the quarter. I think there are many factors impacting the numbers. Part of that is just seasonality.

Tony Hou
Tony Hou
CFO at Sea Limited

Part of that is also in terms of the forex, of the U.S. exchange rate, etc. But I think we'll update the market when we see more numbers. Regarding the DFS, for the DFS, we do believe that still a large part of the DFS is contributed by the credit businesses, I think, as we shared in the opening. If you look at the credit businesses, at this point in time, still a sizable part of that is contributing by the Shopee PayLater, which is growing together with the Shopee. But although we do see there are better penetrations over time within Shopee for Shopee PayLater. Besides Shopee PayLater, there's also many other use cases like the Buy Cash Loan, we call BCL, which is not part of the Shopee payment system. It's a cash loan you can take out to spend in any other places.

Tony Hou
Tony Hou
CFO at Sea Limited

Also, we are increasing the use cases in other scenarios. For example, the offline Shopee PayLater, for example, in Indonesia, you can scan a QR code. Using ShopeePay to scan a QR code and pay that with SPL, similar to a credit card experience. We also have handphone loans in Indonesia as well, expanding to other markets. I think all those use cases will expand our digital financial businesses beyond the Shopee ecosystem. In terms of the sales and marketing, I think our businesses have a fairly good margin, as you can see from the EBITDAs. At the same time, our business is still in a very early stage. The penetration on Shopee is still in the early stage. The cash loan is still in the early stage. Many other use cases are still in the early stage.

Tony Hou
Tony Hou
CFO at Sea Limited

We see there's a huge potential there to grow over time. In some quarters, we do see there are good acquisition channels. In some quarters, we see a new product mix change because our new products are coming out, etc. There is an intention to acquire more users to our digital financial service ecosystem, given the very good economics we have seen so far. The actual marketing spending depends a little bit on what we see on the customer acquisition cost and the UE we saw from the new users, plus the new product we're launching in different markets. It will fluctuate a little bit just in practice.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Sachin Salgaonkar from Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Sachin Salgaonkar
Sachin Salgaonkar
Managing Director at Bank of America

Hi. Congrats on a good set of numbers. I have two questions. First question is on Shopee EBITDA. You already achieved EBITDA break-even in Shopee for Southeast Asia. So should we think this is sustainable going ahead and we could see improvement in EBITDA out here, or there was some seasonality factor specifically in this quarter? Should we see some volatility in EBITDA, or directly, it should continue to improve? And second question is on average revenue per user in the gaming business. We saw it being lower than the historical trend. So just wanted to check, anything specific happened in the quarter, or is this a new trend going ahead?

Tony Hou
Tony Hou
CFO at Sea Limited

Thank you. On the EBITDA side, it does contribute partially by the seasonality as well, simply because in most of our market, we are contribution margin positive. So we see a higher top line. It will help us on the EBITDA as well. Similar to the top lines, we are observing the trend on how the market evolves during the quarter. I think we are about one and a half months into the quarter. Our guidance, shared previously, we are pretty confident of achieving that. And whether there are any changes to that, I think we will share with the market. Yeah.

Forrest Li
Forrest Li
Chairman and CEO at Sea Limited

For the game, I think that it simply reflects we have a lot of new users to come to our game, especially for Free Fire, right? Even Free Fire has been in its seventh year, but we see it very, very effectively attract new users. That's why we believe the game can still go for a very, very long time. When we have the new gamers, new players coming to the game, and in general, I think their kind of average spending is compared to the more kind of experienced gamers or who have played the game for a longer time will be relatively low, right? Usually, gamers will kind of play the game, and the more they play, there will be better engagement. Then there's a higher chance for the monetization. So I think there's nothing specifically about the monetization.

Forrest Li
Forrest Li
Chairman and CEO at Sea Limited

It's kind of just a reflection of the fact that there's a very, very strong user growth for the game in the Q1.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Piyush Choudhary from HSBC. Please go ahead.

Piyush Choudhary
Piyush Choudhary
Managing Director at HSBC

Yeah. Hi. Good evening, management. And congratulations for a strong set of results. Two questions. Firstly, again, going back to 2024 guidance, after such strong performance, why Shopee guidance of turning EBITDA positive in 2H has not been revised upwards? Do you expect volatility in the upcoming quarter? If you can comment on the competitive intensity in Indonesia and across ASEAN after the merger of TikTok and Tokopedia, has there been an increase in competition, and does your keeping guidance unchanged? Any color over there will be helpful. That is the first question. Secondly, in DFS, is it higher customer acquisition cost or even higher funding cost, which has led to margin drop? And if you can talk a little bit about the outlook for the margins in DFS? Thank you.

Tony Hou
Tony Hou
CFO at Sea Limited

On the competitions, we have seen the market has been relatively stable in terms of competitions. We didn't see any particular signs of changes, to be honest. Of course, we cannot predict what the competitors are doing, but we didn't see any particular signs of difference on competitions. On the guidance, again, I think we are very encouraged by the number we see in Q1. We are pretty confident on achieving what we shared. And I think we are coming to 1.5 months in Q2. I think we will look at the market a bit more. I think in the time when we have a better sense of the numbers, we will share with the market on how we look at the forward-looking guidance. There's no particular reason of that from competition or other reasons. Yeah.

Tony Hou
Tony Hou
CFO at Sea Limited

For the DFS questions, the margin fluctuations are more coming from the acquisition cost rather than on the funding cost. In fact, our funding cost is actually getting better quarter-over-quarter. Again, the acquisition cost, a lot depending on what do we see from the market, how much we spend on acquiring users versus the value they will bring to us in long term, and also depend on the new product launches we have in various markets.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Ranjan Sharma from JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Ranjan Sharma
Ranjan Sharma
Executive Director at JPMorgan

Hi. Good evening. Thank you for the presentation. Two questions, please. Firstly, on the sales and marketing expense, it seems they're reduced to 2.9% of GMV for the e-commerce business. Based on your comments on competition, should we expect or are you seeing the same level of spend in the second quarter as well? The second question is on the fintech side, if you can shed some color on how much of the loan book is coming from Brazil or whether that will be a focus for the lending business given the strategy of some of your competitors in the market. Thank you.

Tony Hou
Tony Hou
CFO at Sea Limited

Yeah. On the sales and marketing spend for e-commerce, we do see there is a reduction in Q1 by many different reasons. Part of that is due to the live streaming that the big investment we've done in Q3 and Q4 last year started to give us the benefits, so we don't need to spend so much. Part of that is general marketplace spending optimized. In the coming quarter, I believe that we'll continue to optimize our sales and marketing spending. And we do believe that the general trend will come down. Although, honestly, if you look at month-to-month, there will be some fluctuations even for upcoming reasons or for Forex reasons, etc. Yeah. For the loan book, we do have a high expectation for Brazil. We do believe that Brazil can be a very good market for our digital financial service businesses.

Tony Hou
Tony Hou
CFO at Sea Limited

Although we only started Brazil mid-last year, which gives us a very short period of time to accumulate our loan book. So right now, the Brazil loan book is still, let's say, a relatively smaller share of our entire loan book businesses. I don't think we just closed the country-by-country split for the loan book. But yeah, it's a small part of it, and it can be a potential good growth driver in future.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Jiong Shao of Barclays. Please go ahead.

Jiong Shao
Jiong Shao
Managing Director at Barclays

Thank you for taking my questions. Congrats on the strong results. Two quick follow-ups on the e-commerce side. One is I was wondering, could you talk about linearity in your improvement in unit economics throughout the quarter? And related to that, the percentage of live streaming in terms of the orders now. And I think that's the first question, which is why people are asking why Q2 is not a break-even point for you. And then I had a follow-up question on the Shopee Express SPX business. You talked about over 50% of orders in Asia are done through Shopee Express and 70% in Brazil. Do you have a target number for the percentage for orders fulfilled by Shopee Express and the unit economics or contribution margin for the orders done through SPX? Is that any different from your average, or is that better or worse?

Jiong Shao
Jiong Shao
Managing Director at Barclays

Any information or color or data point would be very, very appreciated. Thank you.

Tony Hou
Tony Hou
CFO at Sea Limited

For live streaming, in terms of the percentage of orders, it's stable versus last quarter. I think we share the percentage around 15% in Southeast Asia last quarter. I think it's relatively stable, although the basket size increased during this quarter because we optimized some of the category mix and the UEs. In terms of the driver for the UE improvement, as I shared earlier, it's both the live streaming part of the improvement and general marketplace improvement. Actually, on top of that, since we talked about the logistics piece, we also see a better logistics cost improved over time, which drives down the cost as well fundamentally. In terms of the percentage of the orders through our own logistics, I think each market might evolve slightly differently. So we probably don't have a fixed target for all the markets.

Tony Hou
Tony Hou
CFO at Sea Limited

Although what we can say is, largely, on average, I think we'll see a bigger part of the share of logistics will go to our own SPX. It should be more than what we have right now, but we probably wouldn't set a very, very specific target for all the markets. In terms of the unit economics for those orders, given that our cost per order for our own SPX is lower than the cost per order for 3PLs in the market, essentially, for every order we deliver in-house, we will be able to save part of that cost, which essentially contributes part of the unit economics improvement that you see here. I think the degree of the UE difference is slightly varies market by market. But I think the trend is pretty stable across most of the market that we're able to improve this over time even further. Yeah.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Pang Vittayaamnuaykoon from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Pang Vittayaamnuaykoon
Pang Vittayaamnuaykoon
Executive Director at Goldman Sachs

Thank you very much. Two follow-up questions from my side. Firstly, on the logistics for Shopee Express as well, you did share that you see a greater unit economics for Shopee Express versus 3PL. Can you explain or walk us through a little bit on how you've done it differently, and how are you able to achieve this better unit economics and efficiencies versus 3PL as well? That's question number one. Question number two, earlier, you have mentioned that there is still room for advertisement take rate, especially versus global peers for Shopee. Can you share the current ad take rate you've seen currently for Shopee, and what's the long-term target on what Shopee can achieve?

Tony Hou
Tony Hou
CFO at Sea Limited

Yeah. On the logistics front, there are a couple of reasons that drive better UEs. I think number one, there's a margin, actually, that the 3PL takes. So we retain that margin, as simple as that. That's number one. Even if you take that out, I think we're still better for a few reasons. One is we are able to better plan our CapEx over a long period of time because we are able to forecast how our business is evolving, not only just the total volume but the volume split in different regions, in different routes, etc. So this helps us to optimize our CapEx and our operating models for a long period of time. That's one. Second one is given that we have a good forecast even in the short term on our order volume upstream.

Tony Hou
Tony Hou
CFO at Sea Limited

For example, in the next week, what our volume will be or in the next day, what the volume will be, this will help us to do a lot of operation planning better. For example, how many workers you want to come into work today versus tomorrow, and how many trucks you want to prepare for pickups tomorrow or two days later. I think this will essentially help us to improve on the day-to-day operation efficiencies. Number three is even beyond the planning, we are able to retool quite a lot of the buyer sorry, seller behaviors to optimize for our logistics. For example, the way that we pick up from the sellers, when the seller should pack their product, whether the seller should drop off versus pick up, all those things, we can do quite a lot of influence on the upstream to optimize for the downstream fulfillment.

Tony Hou
Tony Hou
CFO at Sea Limited

Number four is, as a technology company, we do have better tech capabilities in terms of how do we use technology to optimize our entire supply chain. All those tools, all those automations, and all those forecasting models we build will help us to essentially have better efficiencies through the fulfillment network. I think number four is because we can work together with the marketplace side, we can roll out quite a lot of new services to the consumers. But when we roll out new services, we can control the cost because we can do many of the new service planning end-to-end together with the marketplace upstream. I think one of the examples that in the opening we give is the On-Time Guarantee deliveries. To do that, I think everybody can do that theoretically. You can always give a voucher to the fact that if you deliver late.

Tony Hou
Tony Hou
CFO at Sea Limited

Right? But how do you do that economically is a big question. How do you make sure that you can have a good forecast of your deliveries end-to-end from the buyer place order to the seller pack the order to the first-mile pickup order to the sorting center and to the mid-mile to the last miles? And the entire modeling process and the entire retooling part of the seller behavior and associate behaviors, that requires a lot more joint planning across the value chain. Because we can do it together, so we can do it more economically compared to if you work with the pure third parties. I think for all that reason putting together, we kind of are able to achieve better unit economics and not only just the cost but also better service levels and differentiated services we can offer to the consumers in our market.

Operator

Your next follow-up question comes from.

Tony Hou
Tony Hou
CFO at Sea Limited

For the ad take rate, I don't think we just closed the ad take rate actual numbers. But what we can share is that if you compare with our global peers, for example, in China or in the U.S., we are kind of still meaningfully lower than where they are. We still have a few percentage to catch up to them. So there's meaningful rooms for us to increase the ad take rate. I think there are a few tools that we can deploy to do that. I think one is just having more seller participation in terms of to enhance the total pool of the SKUs that are utilizing the ad. But in order to do that, we have to develop a simpler ad product for the sellers to use.

Tony Hou
Tony Hou
CFO at Sea Limited

Unlike many of the sellers in a multi-developed market who are more familiar with the ad, in our market, there are quite some sellers that are less familiar with the ad. So we have to customize our ad tool for those sellers to make sure that it's easier for them to adopt so we can have more SKUs into our ad pool. That's number one. Number two is to increase the ad efficiencies through technology. We are spending quite a lot of effort on making sure that we increase the conversion rate for ad products so the conversion ad so we can actually serve more ads to our users because of the increased conversion rate. And number three is to find a way to balance organic and the ad traffic better.

Tony Hou
Tony Hou
CFO at Sea Limited

By having an enhanced product to balance the organic and ad products in a common stream, we can essentially dynamically adjust ad load depends on the conversion rate and the SKU participation and the scenarios within our app. By doing all the three things, we see there is a meaningful potential to increase the ad take rate over the next few quarters.

Operator

The next follow-up question comes from Navin Killa from UBS. Please go ahead.

Navin Killa
Navin Killa
Managing Director at UBS

Hi. Thank you for the opportunity again. I just wanted to ask a question with regards to your cash, which obviously remains strong and continues to grow. I know several of your peers have started talking about buybacks and have even announced buybacks. What's your thinking on the use of the cash balance? Thank you.

Chris Feng
Chris Feng
President at Sea Limited

Yeah. Thanks for the question. We currently don't have any plans on buybacks or any sort of thing. Our operation results are strong, and we are kind of quite confident on our outlook of each of the business lines. Pretty much, we'll be focusing on these.

Operator

The next follow-up question comes from Alicia Yap from Citigroup. Please go ahead.

Alicia Yap
Alicia Yap
Managing Director at Citigroup

Hi. Good evening. Thanks for taking my follow-up questions. Two from me here. One is on the DFS. Can management share the ranking of the growth by the product or the services line and the ranking by the revenue or profitability contribution for your fintech product this quarter? And then second, not sure if I missed it, but assuming if you will be relaunched in India sometime in the future, what could be the incremental upside to the user and the growth if this becomes reality? Thank you.

Tony Hou
Tony Hou
CFO at Sea Limited

For our DFS businesses, there are a few main products that we have: the SPL, Shopee PayLater, and BCL, Buy Cash Loan. The other offline product that we have, I think at this current time, the SPL in terms of outstanding is still the biggest product. If you look at the EBITDA contribution, the UE, the Buy Cash Loan will have a higher UE than the Shopee PayLater. I think that's kind of a rough picture if you were. Yeah.

Forrest Li
Forrest Li
Chairman and CEO at Sea Limited

For Free Fire relaunching in India, at this moment, we are actively working with all the stakeholders, including, yeah, the regulators, the potential local partners, right, to figure out what is the best plan to relaunch Free Fire in India. And well, if that is successful, I think that will be a meaningful potential upside in terms of the users and the bookings considering India is a very, very big market. But just to clarify at this moment for our outlook for the rest of the year in terms of our double-digit growth, right, and this is not taking into consideration of the relaunch in India. It's basically, we come out with guidance and outlook based on the current business, what we have seen for the existing kind of trend of our current market for Free Fire.

Operator

This concludes our Q&A session. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Mr. MC Koh for any closing remarks.

MC Koh
MC Koh
Director of Investor Relations at Sea Limited

Thank you all for joining today's call. We look forward to speaking to all of you again next quarter.

Analysts
    • Alicia Yap
      Managing Director at Citigroup
    • Chris Feng
      President at Sea Limited
    • Divya Kothiyal
      Research Analyst at Morgan Stanley
    • Forrest Li
      Chairman and CEO at Sea Limited
    • Jiong Shao
      Managing Director at Barclays
    • MC Koh
      Director of Investor Relations at Sea Limited
    • Navin Killa
      Managing Director at UBS
    • Pang Vittayaamnuaykoon
      Executive Director at Goldman Sachs
    • Piyush Choudhary
      Managing Director at HSBC
    • Ranjan Sharma
      Executive Director at JPMorgan
    • Sachin Salgaonkar
      Managing Director at Bank of America
    • Tony Hou
      CFO at Sea Limited
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