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

Piyush Choudhary: Congratulations to the management on a strong set of results. Two questions. Firstly, on Shopee, can you discuss GMV growth trends quarter-on-quarter in local currency, which markets are doing better? And any color on the outlook for ’23? How is customer behaviour shaping with Shopee reducing promotions and shipping subsidy? I observe that your AOV has increased by around 22% in local currency terms. So, what is driving that? Secondly, can you give some insights on your CapEx for 2023, which segments would you be investing? And what kind of investments we should expect in 2023 to strengthen your ecosystem? Thank you.

Yanjun Wang: Thank you, Piyush. In terms of GMV growth trends, as we previously shared that GMV remains output for us. It’s not the key KPI as we continue to focus on tightening our efficiency and profitability as we experienced. We think it would generally naturally come down the road. And in terms of the different markets, generally speaking, our Asian market performed within our expectations. And Q4 remains a relatively strong market in terms of the demand by our buyers and consumption patterns. However, we are aware of weakness — continued weakness in online physical consumptions by users across various markets and in particular, some of the markets like Malaysia, as we previously also shared before, remain relatively — in terms of year-on-year comparison, probably particularly that they saw, but of course, previously during COVID, some of these markets also happen to enjoy the strongest and the most spectacular growth during the COVID, so this remains tough comparison.

I think starting from ’23, we’ll generally see some — we’ll see some natural growth hopefully. But on the other hand, this is not something that we focus on and the macro uncertainty remains. And there are too many factors affecting the underlying consumption pattern that as a market leader that we will face. And therefore, it’s not a target that we focus on. So our message stays the same: GMV remains output. And we will discontinue any quarter-on-quarter disclosure of operating metrics like GMV and orders and then we’ll move to an annual disclosure in line with global peers. In terms of CapEx for 2023, most of the CapEx in terms of the biggest ticket items are servers and then followed by some of the logistics related machineries such as sorting machines, and then office and data center leases, et cetera.

Now as we pivot to a strong focus on efficiency, we also have been significantly reducing and tightening our CapEx investments. So you still saw some CapEx spending in Q4 and may continue to see in Q1 earlier this year. But going forward, we expect, at least in the immediate future, CapEx spending shouldn’t be a significant part of our overall expenses. The reason that we might still have some higher number in Q4 and Q1 is because the earlier commitments, as we shared in the previous quarter’s earnings, some of the earlier commitments might arrive at a Q4 or Q1 timetable and that is not entirely within our control, and that might affect our financials. So it’s a timing factor.

Operator: The next question comes from Thomas Chong from Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Thomas Chong: Hi, good evening and thanks management for taking my question. I have a question on Garena. Can you comment about the near-term trend and the full year outlook for the gaming business? I just want to get some color about whether we have any new games that we should be anticipating for this year? And my second question is about the total headcount. Can management comment about the number of headcounts in 2022? And how we should think about 2023, if we would do the hiring?