In 2022 Sea Limited, the Singapore company Forrest Li built out of a video game, lost more than ninety percent of its stock market value and cut about seven thousand jobs to survive. The habit that put it there, funding one business with the profits of another, is now funding Li’s newest bet: a lending arm called Monee.
He was born Li Xiaodong in the port city of Tianjin, and picked up the name Forrest after an American lecturer asked him for a Western one and he thought of Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump. He spent his teenage evenings in Chinese internet cafes, playing the same kind of games his company would one day sell across Southeast Asia.
He studied engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, then spent two years in process engineering at Motorola and Corning before deciding he had no future as a corporate manager. He left for Stanford’s business school, and in 2009, soon after graduating, started a games company in Singapore called Garena.
A year later he flew to Shenzhen and asked Tencent’s Pony Ma for one thing: the Southeast Asian rights to a new game called League of Legends. Ma said yes, then handed over three more titles, Crossfire among them. Tencent became an early investor in Garena, and Garena became the region’s gaming gatekeeper, with its own hit, Free Fire, eventually drawing more than a hundred million players a day.
Gaming paid for the next move. Li has acknowledged the mechanism himself: Garena’s profit was channelled to fund Shopee, the e-commerce app Sea launched in 2015 to fight Lazada and Tokopedia for Southeast Asia’s online shoppers. Shopee subsidised free shipping and seller fees for years, and Garena’s cash covered the gap.
It worked, and it nearly broke the company. Sea posted a net loss of US$1.46 billion in 2019 and US$1.62 billion in 2020, most of it Shopee’s subsidy bill, while the stock kept climbing on the promise that scale would eventually pay for itself.
The promise looked proven in October 2021, when Sea’s shares peaked near US$367 and investors treated Southeast Asia’s internet build-out as already won.
Four months later, India banned Free Fire.
On 14 February 2022, India blocked fifty-four apps it linked to Chinese ownership, including the mobile game that had carried Garena’s profit for a decade. A month earlier, Tencent had already sold down its stake to cut its voting power in Sea to under 10 percent, keeping only the economic share.
The ban landed anyway, and Sea’s shares fell 18.4 percent in New York trading. Singapore’s own government publicly asked why a company domiciled in Singapore had been treated as Chinese.
Sea retreated hard. It shut e-commerce operations in India, pulled back from Latin America and Europe, and cut about seven thousand jobs over the following year. By the end of 2022 the company was freezing salaries and trimming bonuses just to hold onto cash.
The turn came in March 2023, with Sea’s first profitable quarter since its 2017 listing. Li told staff that the company’s “large-scale changes are complete, and we do not foresee further major changes.” Then he added the sentence that mattered more than the reassurance: “our job is not yet done.”
It held. In the quarter to June 2026, Sea’s revenue reached US$7.8 billion, up 48 percent on the year, and net income hit US$488 million. Shopee alone moved US$38.3 billion of goods through its app, up 28 percent, and threw off US$255 million of its own adjusted profit, the measure Sea reports after stripping out interest, tax and non-cash charges.
That profit is now doing what Garena’s once did. Monee, Sea’s lending arm, grew its loan book 62 percent over the same year to US$11.1 billion, while holding the share of borrowers who stop repaying, its delinquency rate, near 1 percent. Brazil, the newest market, became the fourth to cross US$1 billion in loans outstanding, growing more than 250 percent in a year.
Let the business that already works carry the one that does not, until the second one works too.
The mechanism is the same relay Li has run since 2015: let the business that already works carry the one that does not, until the second one works too.
Garena carried Shopee past Lazada and Tokopedia. Shopee is now carrying Monee past its own shoppers, into borrowers an e-commerce app would never otherwise reach.
The bet: within twelve months, Monee’s loan book passes US$18 billion, and Brazil alone crosses US$2 billion, just three years after Monee entered one of the world’s most underserved credit markets. It holds only if Sea keeps underwriting new borrowers off Shopee’s own transaction data without breaking the delinquency rate that has held near 1 percent through the entire expansion. If a credit cycle cracks that number anywhere in the book, it cracks first in Brazil, the newest market with the least history behind it.1
A founder running two businesses on one balance sheet rarely gets to pick when the subsidy ends. Li built Sea by letting the profitable half carry the unprofitable half for exactly as long as it took, not a quarter longer.
The habit nearly killed the company once. He is still betting it will not happen twice.
The habit nearly killed the company once. He is still betting it will not happen twice.
Footnotes
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India never explained why a Singapore-domiciled company’s game counted as Chinese for the 2022 ban; the clearest answer on record is Tencent’s own, which is that it had already cut its voting rights in Sea below 10 percent the month before and kept the ban out of its filings as a non-event. ↩