The Business of Fashion
Agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion community.
Agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion community.
Singapore’s Sea Group, which owns e-commerce player Shopee, announced this week that it more than doubled its annual revenues and gross profits on the back of a surge in demand for online shopping and gaming, Deal Street Asia reports.
Sea’s revenues for 2020 were up 101 percent year-on-year at $4.4 billion, while gross profits hit $1.3 billion, a 123 percent boost from 2019′s $604 million. Total adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) totalled $107 million, up from a $178 million loss the previous year.
Alongside its gaming division Garena, this growth was driven by e-commerce. Marketplace revenues (transaction-based fees, advertising and other services) and product revenues (direct sales) reached $1.6 billion and $575 million respectively. Shopee’s gross orders reached $1 billion — a 134 percent year-on-year increase — and the platform ranked first in app stores’ shopping categories across Southeast Asia and Taiwan by monthly active users and downloads for the year.
But the group’s new target markets are farther from home. Sea has already kicked off its expansion into LATAM’s (Latin America’s) two largest e-commerce markets, Brazil and Mexico. Shopee launched an online shopping portal in Brazil in 2019 featuring the same merchants as its Asian platforms; it will roll out a Mexican app this year.
Though e-commerce reshaped retailing in the US and Europe even before the pandemic, a confluence of economic, financial and logistical circumstance kept the South American nation insulated from the trend until later.
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This week’s round-up of global markets fashion business news also features Latin American mall giants, Nigerian craft entrepreneurs and the mixed picture of China’s luxury market.