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Sea Ltd
19 CÈ pieces since 18 June 2026: 14 intel items, 5 essays. Newest first.All companies →
Garena's profits built Shopee, so why is Shopee now the one funding Forrest Li's next bet?
Within twelve months Monee's loan book passes US$18 billion and Brazil alone crosses US$2 billion, a bet that holds only if Sea keeps underwriting new borrowers off Shopee's own data without breaking the 1 percent delinquency rate the expansion has held so far.
Should a Bandung seller under US$28,000 a year let Shopee withhold 0.5%? One form stops it
Since 1 October, Shopee, Tokopedia, Lazada and Blibli withhold 0.5% of Indonesian sellers’ gross sales as income tax. Individual sellers with yearly turnover up to US$28,000 are exempt, but only after filing a written declaration with the marketplace.
Sorting 10,000 customer messages for under US$1? Cloudflare’s open Clef model reads and tags them
Cloudflare released Clef, an open model that answers set questions about a message, such as which team should handle it. Hosted, it costs US$0.24 per million tokens, the word pieces models bill by; the download is free for commercial use.
Still paying someone to click through portals and forms? OpenAI's new model does it for a fifth of the price
OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Sol, a model that writes code and operates a computer screen by itself, at about one-fifth the cost of its top model, Astra. On a benchmark of science tasks it averaged US$5.47 a task against US$23.21 for Claude Opus 5.5.
An hour of live interpretation for US$1.54: Alibaba's new translator lags 2.3 seconds behind the speaker
Alibaba released Qwen3.8-LiveTranslate, an interpreter that translates speech while the speaker is still talking. It understands 60 languages and speaks back in 29, with average lag of 2.3 seconds. Singapore-region pricing works out near US$1.54 an hour of speech.
What changes for a Jakarta seller on 1 October? Shopee starts withholding 0.5% of gross sales
Indonesia's tax office confirmed Shopee, Tokopedia, Lazada and Blibli will withhold 0.5 percent of gross sales as income tax from 1 October. Sellers turning over under US$28,000 a year stay exempt.
Who eats the surprise customs bill? FedEx will guarantee the checkout quote for US$99 a month
FedEx opened Global Trade Navigator on 9 September: a free planner that estimates duties, taxes and fees from a product description or photo with no login, plus a US$99-a-month Shopify app that covers any shortfall against the quote.
One tenth on research, nine tenths on hooks: Sonic Song’s NTD 30m split
A tenth of the mandate went into market research and consumer surveys in the first month or two. The other nine tenths bought things a player could hold.
Indonesia halved e-commerce platform fees. Cross-border sellers got none.
On the inner citadel, and the week Jakarta decided which e-commerce sellers count as local enough for a fifty percent discount.
The invoice becomes the collateral: Ping An lends cross-border sellers 95% of receivables in a day
Ping An Digital Bank launched purchase-order financing for export e-commerce merchants, advancing up to 95 percent of receivables, facilities to $5 million and terms to 120 days, underwritten on real-time marketplace sales data.
Zero-shot forecasting lands with a licence catch: Google's TimesFM-3 tops fev-bench on 330M parameters
The 330M-parameter model forecasts multiple related series at once without fine-tuning, ranking first on fev-bench across 100 tasks. Its code ships Apache-2.0; the weights carry a non-commercial licence.
The marketplace became the lender: Sea's Monee books an $11.1B loan portfolio as revenue grows 48%
Sea Limited posted $7.8 billion in second-quarter revenue, up 48.1% year on year. Monee, its financial arm, grew 58.9% to $1.4 billion on an $11.1 billion loan book with non-performing loans steady at 1%.
Four marketplaces just became tax collectors: Indonesia withholds 0.5% of every seller's turnover
From August 1, Tokopedia, Shopee, Lazada, and Blibli withhold 0.5% of gross seller turnover as income tax under PMK 37/2025. Sellers below 500 million rupiah a year can claim exemption on declaration.
Live commerce reaches US$186 billion by 2030 (and still pays the creator before the platform)
BeLive shut a million-user consumer platform because it cost more to run than it collected. The region’s largest platforms are answering the same arithmetic from the seller’s side.
Shopping moves inside the chatbot: Sea and OpenAI put Shopee in ChatGPT across eight markets
Sea and OpenAI expanded their partnership to place Shopee inside ChatGPT for shoppers in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Brazil, and to bring ChatGPT for Business to Shopee's sellers for listings, service, and operations.
Salesforce ships Agentforce Commerce with agents that buy and sell inside ChatGPT
On July 6 Salesforce made its Shopper, Buyer, and Merchant agents generally available, with native integration into ChatGPT and Google's AI Mode and Gemini to follow, moving retail transactions from search results into agent-mediated chat.
Meta's Business Agent turns WhatsApp into an always-on salesperson for merchants
The AI agent answers product questions, vets buyers, and closes orders inside WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram chats, with a Shopee integration aimed squarely at Southeast Asia's chat-commerce habits.
Southeast Asia's marketplaces raise seller fees as growth turns to monetisation
Shopee added a 5 percent technical-support fee across Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam this year, and TikTok Shop lifted Vietnam commissions to 12.5 percent, pushing total effective take rates toward 20 to 25 percent of post-discount sales.
From a Singapore HQ on a Monday: what Shopee’s cuts say about knowledge work
Sea cut roughly 8 percent of Shopee’s developers and blamed AI by name. The number that actually moved was the cost of shipping the next thing, and headcount followed it down.