Shopee's Parent Company's Wealth Plunges Rp15.3 Trillion in a Day, Why?

Dream - Two billionaires, co-founders of Sea Ltd, the parent company of e-commerce platform Shopee, experienced a decrease in their net worth overnight. This came after the Singapore-based technology giant reported disappointing second-quarter earnings.

On Tuesday (August 15, 2023), Sea's stocks experienced the largest daily drop since the company went public in 2017, with prices falling nearly 29% on the New York Stock Exchange.

The plummeting stocks wiped out approximately US$1 billion (Rp15.3 trillion) of Chairman and CEO Forrest Li's wealth, leaving his net worth at US$2.5 billion (Rp38.2 trillion) on the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List.

Meanwhile, Chief Operating Officer Gang Ye lost around US$565 million (Rp8.6 trillion) of wealth due to the stock drop. His remaining net worth is US$1.8 billion (Rp27.5 trillion).

According to Forbes, Sea stated that its second-quarter revenue increased by 5.2% year-on-year to US$3.1 billion, but this fell short of analysts' expectations of US$3.2 billion.

Its e-commerce business, Shopee, which contributes around two-thirds of the company's revenue, experienced the slowest growth rate at 20.6%, reaching US$2.1 billion.

The profit-generating gaming unit, which helps fund Sea's expansion in e-commerce and digital financial services, saw a decline of 41.2% to US$529 million. However, revenue from digital financial services increased by 53.4% to $423 million.

Sea reported a net profit of US$331 million in the second quarter, compared to a loss of US$931 million in the same period last year.

"We have started, and will continue to, increase our investment in growing our e-commerce business across our markets," said Li during the earnings call.

"Such investments will impact our profitability and may result in losses for Shopee and our group as a whole in certain periods," he added.

Li's statement, which came as Shopee faces increasingly fierce competition from rivals such as Alibaba's Lazada and ByteDance's TikTok, marks a shift from the company's focus on improving profitability.

Sea reported its first profit in the fourth quarter of 2022, following cost-cutting measures involving thousands of layoffs and salary freezes.

Founded in 2009, Sea was once the best-performing stock in the world during the peak of the pandemic.

Sea's market capitalization has since dropped nearly 89% from its peak in October 2021. This decline has led to David Chen, one of Sea's three founders, dropping out of the billionaire ranks.