Room for growth in Southeast Asia’s e-commerce space, says Shopee’s billionaire founder Forrest Li

SINGAPORE: E-commerce penetration in Southeast Asia, including Singapore, is on the “low end” compared with markets like the United States and China, said the billionaire founder of e-commerce platform Shopee on Thursday (Nov 7).
This means there is room for growth, Mr Forrest Li told CNA at a fireside chat during the Singapore FinTech Festival. 
“The way to grow it (e-commerce) is … to make … products even cheaper and easier to access,” said Mr Li, who also runs gaming platform Garena under New York listed and Singaporean parent company Sea Group. 
“There’s still a long way to go … We are serving … hundreds of millions of customers daily. I hope that one day, it could be over a billion.”
The tech innovator said he is looking at how to use emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and blockchain, to better serve customers.
“We want to contribute (and) participate in those technology developments, but we also want to be more focused on the application and how to use this technology and to change it to the daily product and the services people can benefit from,” he said. 
Mr Li acknowledged ongoing challenges in the tech industry, which was battered on several fronts in recent years due to a tough post-pandemic business climate, leading to layoffs and slower revenue growth.
In 2022, Mr Li lost 80 per cent of his US$22 billion net worth, after he emerged as one of the biggest losers of a market crash that wiped a total of more than US$1 trillion from the net worth of the world’s 500 richest people that year. 
However, things are looking up for Sea. After posting losses in the first quarter of this year, the firm swung back into profit in the second quarter.
The fintech industry, a relatively new space for Sea, is an exciting growth opportunity, said Mr Li,  who is among Singapore’s richest men with a net worth of about US$6 billion.
The firm started with e-wallet support businesses in Vietnam and Thailand in 2014 before expanding into consumer and small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) credit loans, tapping into the Shopee ecosystem. 
With money hard to borrow for the less well-off when they need it the most, his firm has been giving out credit loans in markets like Indonesia, said Mr Li. 
He noted that lending services and credit card penetration are low in the world’s fourth most populous nation, where people borrow a couple hundred dollars on average via his firm. 
“It’s a very, very small amount, but this can make a big difference in their lives. Credit services will help a lot of people to do things better, to enjoy their life better,” he said. 
On the other hand, he pointed out the difference in the needs of those in Singapore, where Sea operates a digital bank.
“We realise a lot of Singaporeans have the desire to invest, but (they are) really short of investment products, and they don’t know what to do,” he said, adding that many of them are first-time investors who are digitally savvy.
To plug this gap, his firm launched an investment product that markets itself on being accessible to all, with a minimum investment value of just S$1 (US$0.76).
Mr Li stressed Sea’s emphasis on technology and inclusivity.
“It doesn’t matter which industry (or business) we are in – we always really focus on how technology can make things different and how technology can make the product better, more convenient,” he said.
Despite rapid technology breakthroughs, many people on the ground may not experience their benefits, noted Mr Li.
This is why his firm prides itself on making its tech accessible, he said, giving an example of how Garena’s popular mobile game Fire Free can be played even on a low-end phone with poor battery performance and a patchy internet connection. 
“The only reason for doing that … (is that) more people can play our games, and more people can enjoy the games,” he said. 
The drive to be inclusive extends to Shopee, which constantly tries to lower prices and delivery costs, he added. 
“When we push down the delivery cost and still can maintain the quality of the delivery, the speed of the delivery … even people … in the rural areas can enjoy the benefit of e-commerce,” he said of the platform that operates in several countries including Indonesia, Vietnam and Brazil.