Just to help address:-
If Sea’s e-commerce business is “asset-light” and they don’t own the inventory, how can they have negative gross margin in the e-commerce segment? Does anyone here understands the drivers?
And agree that even 3p margins now are very low and I don’t have an answer on that.
They don’t have negative gross margin but wafer thin positivegross margin. What they do have is massive negative net margins - this is driven by the $400m+ spend in sale and marketing each quarter.
I think that I’ve mentioned this before… they have the most enormous online/offline, print and on air advertising budget I have seen in the 12 years in Singapore - Lazada is non-existent by comparison. Having Christiano Ronaldo as their brand ambassador across their campaigns undoubtedly costs them a fortune too.
We have all seen what Amazon and Shopify is prepared to do to invest in growth and forsake profitability - Shopee takes this to another level that I have never seen before.
Ant