Thank you and happy holidays!

2020-12-23

Dear Sailors,

Thank you all for your excellent work during this unusual year!

2020 has been a landmark year for Sea. All our businesses set new growth records amid global disruptions. Garena has kept Free Fire as the top grossing mobile game in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Shopee remains the most downloaded shopping app across Southeast Asia and Taiwan, and the second-most downloaded globally. SeaMoney has shown strong growth, with quarterly paying users surpassing 17 million in the last quarter.

I’m incredibly proud of what all of you have done to make this happen. The pandemic accelerated digitization, which helped us, but it was our ability to adapt quickly and execute well that allowed us to capture a huge share of this growth opportunity.

What enabled this? Our greatest strength: keeping our customers at the center of what we do. We demonstrated this in two ways this year.

First: finding special ways to engage our local ground even while serving a global audience. Whether by making a Bollywood star into a Free Fire character in India, hosting an online festival for durian sellers in Malaysia, or getting national football players to captain online teams for charity in Colombia, this has not just grown our customer base, but also deepened our ability to excite and retain them.

Second: swiftly identifying and addressing new needs arising from the pandemic. When the physical world shut down, people needed our platforms to remain connected, and for their businesses to survive. We worked quickly to build more social elements into our games, scale up essential household offerings in our online stores, roll out Seller Support Packages to help merchants get back on their feet, and much more.

Looking at this year, I am more convinced than ever of our ability to use technology to do good in the world – by always putting what our customers need first.

I know this has taken a great deal of hard work, and many of you have been affected by the pandemic too. Our office-bound teams had to adjust to working from home while ramping up operations, and our teams on the ground often took on personal risk to keep things moving. Some of you had to overcome the virus in your own or your family’s lives.

I thank you all deeply for overcoming these challenges and going above and beyond for Sea. Without you, none of our success would be possible. I wish I could have traveled to meet and thank you in person, as I usually enjoy doing. With vaccines raising the hope of an end to this pandemic, I look forward to having our gatherings again soon.

Since I could not do so in person, let me welcome the many new Sailors who joined us in 2020, over 10,000 of you! I know starting a new job during a pandemic can be challenging. You may not have seen your office yet, or met your colleagues face to face. This is especially so for our Brazil team, where most joined us only this year! This can make it hard to feel a sense of belonging, but I want you to know that each and every one of you is part of the Sea family, and I am very happy to have you with us.

A warm welcome also to Phoenix Labs, an acclaimed game development studio in North America who we were excited to bring into Garena in January. As a studio that shares our mission of producing great games, creating the best teams, and putting players first, we knew you would make a great addition to our family.

In an exceptional year like this, it is more important than ever to remember that it is always Day One. Staying humble must remain a core value at Sea, no matter how small or big a company we are. Even though we have come far, we still have so much we want to do, and do better!

I am happy to see our teams demonstrating this mindset even at the very end of a successful year, producing two more exciting achievements this month. First, we have been selected for the award of a digital banking licence in Singapore, opening up a whole new world for us; second, we have successfully raised $2.9 billion in new funding. I thank everyone who has worked hard to end the year on this high note, setting a great foundation for us to build on next year – new opportunities, and the resources to capture them with.

The holiday season is a good time for reflection and rest. We have been busy this year. I urge you all to take the break that you need, and come back refreshed and ready to take on everything the new year has to offer.

2020 has been a big year for Sea, and with your continued trust and effort, 2021 will bring us to even greater heights. A year from now, I look forward to writing you another end-of-year note filled with the same optimism and gratitude that I feel today, for all the progress I know we will make.

I wish you and your families a very happy holiday season!

Forrest