Pod Insights The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network TIP816: Sea Limited (SE): Can Sea Limited 10x Again? w/ Daniel Mahncke & Shawn O’Malley About this episode Daniel Mahncke and Shawn O'Malley take a deep dive into Sea Limited — the largest Southeast Asian marketplace whose investment case now turns on two of the most debated questions in the stock today: whether Shopee's dominance across Southeast Asia can hold up against TikTok Shop without margins being structurally capped near current levels, and whether Sea's expansion into Brazil, head-to-head with Mercado Libre, is the next leg of the story or a costly distraction from the markets where the company already wins. IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN: (00:00:00) Intro (00:02:36) How Sea Limited was founded (00:06:39) Which business units belong to Sea Limited (00:11:48) How a gaming business is funding Shopee and Monee (00:16:54) How Monee compares to Mercado Libre's Mercado Pago (00:42:32) Why Shopee has become the largest e-commerce company in SEA (01:19:22) How Sea Limited’s moat looks like (01:28:17) Why Sea Limited is so strong in Brazil (01:34:22) Valuation discussion of SE (01:35:51) Intrinsic value of SE (01:36:39) Whether Shawn and Daniel add SE to the Intrinsic Value Portfolio BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community. Track The Intrinsic Value Portfolio. Norges Bank Interview with SE CEO. Jimmy’s Journal's Article on SEA. RS Capital Deep Dive on SEA. Hayden Capital Interview with Drew Cohen. Hayden Capital Shareholder Letter. Previous Intrinsic Value breakdowns: Mercado Libre, Coupang, Amazon. Follow Shawn on X and Linkedin. Follow Daniel on X and Linkedin. Related books mentioned in the podcast. Ad-free episodes on our Premium Feed. NEW TO THE SHOW? Get smarter about valuing businesses through The Intrinsic Value Newsletter. Check out The Investor’s Podcast Starter Packs. Follow our official social media accounts: X | LinkedIn | Facebook. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: HardBlock Human Rights Foundation Plus500 Netsuite Shopify Vanta References to any third-party products, services, or advertisers do not constitute endorsements, and The Investor’s Podcast Network is not responsible for any claims made by them. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm
Transcript 18,795 words · 4 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 You're listening to TIP.
0:03 Speaker 01 Well, we have been on quite a journey together, Daniel, studying e-commerce giants around the world. We covered Amazon, which became one of our largest portfolio positions. And then we talked about Kuipeng, the so-called Amazon of South Korea. And more recently, we deep dived into MercadoLibre, the dominant e-commerce and fintech platform across Latin America. And that also found its way into our portfolio. So it's safe to say we appreciate the business models built around dominant e-commerce platforms. And really, the economies of scale that can come with that. And so today, we are heading somewhere that most Western investors don't spend as much time. And that is the seven countries in Southeast Asia, plus Taiwan, an area with a combined population of around 700 million people,
0:47 Speaker 01 a median age just in the mid twenties, rapidly growing smartphone penetration, and e-commerce adoption that's still very much in the early innings compared to the rest of the world. So the long-term tailwinds here might actually be even more compelling than with MercadoLibre in Latin America, where we thought that these tailwinds were already very powerful in their own right. And so without further ado, the company we are discussing today is C Limited, which trades under the New York Stock Exchange, under the ticker SE.
1:15 Speaker 02 I certainly look forward to today's episode. For one, because I'm pretty bullish on Melly, as you and the audience know. And also because C Limited is not only a big competitor in Brazil through its own marketplace called Shopee, but also because C Limited, as a company itself, right? It's just an incredible business that certainly deserves an episode on its own. And one similarity between Melly and C is that they both understand their target audiences and just the needs of their customers incredibly well, and use that to create some of the best and the most dual businesses that we have covered here on the show. And I think listeners will find that out today.
1:53 Speaker 00 Since 2014, with more than 200 million downloads, we have interviewed the world's best investors, studied deeply the principles of value investing and uncovered many compelling investment opportunities. We focus on understanding businesses and intrinsic value, investing accordingly and sharing everything we learn with you. This show is not investment advice. It's intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. All opinions expressed by hosts and guests are solely their own and they may have investments in the securities discussed. Now for your hosts, Sean O'Malley and Daniel Manca.
2:39 Speaker 01 C's history is a bit special though, right? It's a company that I keep bumping into after having researched Melli, but also Grab since C is competitors with both of those businesses. And for anybody not familiar, Grab is, for context, based in Southeast Asia and some people like to refer to them as the Uber of Southeast Asia. And so to be studying the Amazon of Latin America and then the Uber of Southeast Asia and then to come across the same company as being one of their biggest competitors for both businesses, to me, that was really shocking. And then even more bizarre, as I understand it, C started out as a gaming company. So it's fair to say they span across a couple of very, very different business models.
3:21 Speaker 02 Yep, I would say that's a first. A business starting out with a gaming business and then going into all of these other segments and industries. And the founding story is quite special. So C's founder and CEO, Forrest Lee, is Chinese, but he did study at Stanford. And that's where in 2005, I think it was, he listened to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs's legendary commencement speech. And I still remember seeing a video of it a couple of years ago. And it's pretty insane to imagine that Lee must have sat there in the crowd back then and got so inspired by Steve Jobs and, you know, his stories that he thought, "One day, I will build a company of my own." And today, he's worth billions of dollars and C is, as you said, a super app in Southeast Asia, also expanding into other parts of the world. And maybe it makes sense to actually just play a short clip
4:05 Speaker 02 of Steve Jobs's speech and potentially some of the words that also inspired Lee.
4:10 Speaker 03 You can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something. Your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path. And that will make all the difference.
4:35 Speaker 02 Just as for Steve Jobs, it took some time until Lee was able to connect all the dots and build C Limited. But after finishing his MBA at Stanford, he first moved to Singapore and joined a company which was called Gigi Game. And I think that was his first introduction to the video game industry. And it was a small company. And it went bankrupt only a couple of years after he joined, when the financial crisis hit.
4:56 Speaker 01 And with the benefit of hindsight, I mean, that turned out to be a good thing. Since Lee and two of his friends then co-founded a company called Garina about a year later. And that was the much more successful venture. It's fair to say.
5:11 Speaker 02 The first couple of games that they published themselves weren't actually that successful. But in 2010, they got the exclusive publishing rights for League of Legends in Southeast Asia. And League of Legends, or short LOL, is one of the most successful video games out there with more than 150 million monthly active players. And when I first heard that, I was kind of surprised that, you know, a small, newly funded firm would get those publishing rights. But I also learned that LOL was just released at the time. So despite a very promising start, only no one could know how successful that game would end up being. And I gotta admit, I've never personally played LOL, so I don't know much about the game, but obviously I've heard about it before.
5:51 Speaker 01 Gosh, I haven't thought about League of Legends in years. I never played, but my brother was absolutely addicted to World of Warcraft, which, I don't know, is probably a very different game, but seems similar to me. And so, I don't know, a lot of people seem to play both. And hopefully I'm not offending the gaming community by comparing them.
6:10 Speaker 02 I gotta say, I wouldn't know the difference either. And I hope our audience, if you play those games, will forgive us. But getting the publishing rights for a game like League of Legends was obviously a game changer for Garina. So the deal turned the company profitable and made it almost immediately an established name in the gaming space. And even Tencent, you know, this Chinese gaming giant, noticed Garina and started investing in it and also backing it by giving it even more publishing rights for other big games, like for example Call of Duty Mobile. And that was just, you know, the starter for the company to be successful in the gaming space.
6:42 Speaker 01 So we framed today's conversation as being about an e-commerce company. So how do we go from Garina to SEA Limited and e-commerce? And then competing with MercadoLibre in Brazil, of all places?
6:55 Speaker 02 It will be a full circle moment at some point here, but this is kind of where it gets interesting, right? When I first read about Lee, I thought that he likely just left Garina at some point to found SEA Limited. But that wasn't the case. Instead, the gaming business was just rebranded to SEA Limited in, I think it was 2017. And by the way, this SEA, so the S E A in the name stands for Southeast Asia. And with this rebrand, SEA Limited also decided to go beyond publishing existing games and instead give game development another try. And this time, apparently the timing was a bit better than the last time. And they were building Garina's publishing business in the last couple of years. But while they were doing that, smartphones had taken over the market and hundreds of millions of people across Southeast Asia and also Latin America, but also Africa,
7:38 Speaker 02 were getting online for the first time ever. And they basically skipped the PC era and immediately entered the smartphone time, right? That's something we also talked about with Melly, where especially in developing markets, they sometimes skip certain phases. So in e-commerce, for example, it's about the physical store infrastructure and they immediately go online. That's why SEA decided that it is time to go for a mobile game. And there was another trend at the time, I'm not sure if you remember that, but Battle Royale games were a huge thing in the mid to late teens. And maybe they still are, I wouldn't know about that, perhaps they are to a lesser extent. The most famous one back then was certainly Fortnite, but PUBG was also a big one. And those games were of course only designed for high-end devices. In the West. So if you had a premium smartphone, then PUBG was incredible.
8:23 Speaker 02 But if you had a $50 Android phone in, let's say, Indonesia or Brazil or Nigeria, it either didn't run at all or just ran so poorly that it was just unplayable. So see, build a game called Free Fire that pretty much looks like Fortnite, but it worked on cheaper phones without any problems and was optimized for the phone and not a console or PC. And that basically means that you have smaller file sizes, faster match time. So let's say, you know, about 10 minutes per round instead of 30 minutes. And just a gameplay that works even on these slow internal connections that you have in a lot of these countries. And everything about the game was engineered for the user that the global or perhaps the Western world or gaming industry just decided wasn't worth building for.
9:06 Speaker 01 Do I know anything about Battle Royale games, Daniel? Come on, I remember very much. It was like I was in college and it felt like it sweeps the nation. Everybody was gathered around in their dorm rooms, playing Fortnite and these other Battle Royale games. And so I remember it vividly and I've never been a huge gamer, but I definitely indulged in that. And, you know, who can't when all your friends are playing it. But anyways, you know, it's really very different from what Melly has built around this ecosystem of their business. And yet the desire to build something for your local customers, you know, essentially a group that has been massively underserved in different ways up until then. That is that same formula for success here. So there's some similarity between the two companies in that sense,
9:50 Speaker 01 even at the stage where the business models are very different and then later converge.
9:56 Speaker 02 It's kind of insane though, that, you know, even you played Fortnite back in the day, but perhaps you too just have never heard of Free Fire, which is a huge game. After all, it became the world's most downloaded mobile game from 2019 to 2021. And still I haven't heard about it. I mean, at its peak in mid 2021, it had over 150 million daily active users. There were even esports events around the game that I think there were about five and a half million viewers at the same time tuning in, which is one of the highest viewership numbers in the history of mobile esports. And I think in general, they had over 2000 esports events globally in that period. And the game was particularly massive in Brazil, Indonesia, India, and increasingly also in Africa. And that's kind of giving you a hint for why they also went into Brazil a couple of years later with Shopee.
10:42 Speaker 01 Really is incredible that something like that can just go totally past you, especially here in the Western world. And you realize the differences in what's popular around the globe. And I mean, looking at the numbers, the success has not faded at all. Right? I mean, it's not necessarily as close to its peak levels as it was. You still have 100 million monthly active players. And like you, this is a game I'd never heard of before we started looking at this company.
11:06 Speaker 02 Gaming is a bit weird because it's such a volatile business. I guess that's why you usually don't see it being the cash cow for a business. But there are games that just work for many, many years. League of Legends, Counter-Strike, which is a game that I love personally. So these sort of games, apparently Free Fire is one of them too. They can just survive for many, many years. And it is far away from its peak, especially also in revenue. When you compare to 2021, where it brought in $4.3 billion. But it has stabilized now at about $2 billion per year and actually started growing again. I mean, last year it was at $2.5 billion in revenue, which is certainly not bad for a game that is only getting older. And the margins are also pretty high. We're talking high 40s to 50s. And of course, for a business like that, it's the highest margin part of C Limited.
11:51 Speaker 01 And then that cash is presumably used to fund Shopee, which is C's e-commerce business. And then they have another business with a very creative name called Money. That's the fintech arm. And Money is spelled with two E's, M-O-N-E-E, and same with Shopee. So there's kind of a formula to the naming. And yeah, you know, very creative.
12:13 Speaker 02 Sometimes here at TAP, we talk about just making things simple. I think Shopee or C Limited have done a pretty good job of at least making the names pretty simple. But yeah, Garina is not only the highest margin business. It's also the one that has been sustainably profitable for the last 10 years. So Shopee only turned profitable in 2025. And even then, we're only talking about half a billion dollars in profits. And that's on revenue base of over $16.5 billion. And if you look at Shopee's losses over the last five to six years and then compare them to Garina's profits, they more or less balance out. So when we talk about Shopee losing money in its fight with Meli in Brazil, that fight for market share was basically subsidized by a mobile game in Southeast Asia.
12:54 Speaker 01 It feels like we've got a lot of different names that we're leaning on here. There's Shopee, there's Money, there's Garina, and they all make up this broader C Limited company that we're talking about. And I don't know, it's just one of those things, when I think about their different areas of business, that's so beautifully strange that you have to almost just sit back and laugh to appreciate it. Like, you know, sure, Amazon uses AWS, which is a very different type of business model to be in to subsidize its retail e-commerce business. But then somehow, a mobile gaming giant funneling its profits into e-commerce on the other side of the globe is way more amusing to me, and I guess, you know, also sort of baffling.
13:34 Speaker 02 To be honest, if you had told me a couple of years ago that the plan is to fund an entire e-commerce operation and the fintech business through a mobile game, and that's, you know, based on the premise that you can run it on low-quality phones, I would have said it has, you know, a 90% chance of failure. But turns out, it worked pretty well. It's a funding mechanism and also user acquisition channel, but at the same time, it's not the company's future. And that's essentially why C spent so much of its gaming profits and reinvested in a business that, for the longest time, lost money. And that obviously backs the question, will e-commerce and payments be an even more durable, but also profitable business in the long run? I mean, personally, I think it will be, and I would have no confidence in underwriting
14:16 Speaker 02 that Free Fire will still be as popular as it is now in 10 years' time. Also, because, if we're being honest, the long-term investment thesis for Shopee, at least to some extent, is relying on the fact that consumers become wealthier over time. And if they become wealthier, they might also buy better phones, perhaps even on Shopee. And that would mean that the value proposition of Free Fire is kind of getting disrupted, right? Of course, they might just release a better version of the game, so people might not change to the Fortnite and the PUBG's of the world, but that's all pretty speculative. And if I buy C Limited, I don't do it because I want to own the gaming business. It's needed right now, but I hope it won't be at least needed in 10 years' time. Maybe it's still there, maybe it's still producing profits and revenue, but I don't want to, you know, bet my money on that.
15:01 Speaker 02 The fintech business, for example, is something that should be a lot more prominent and important by then.
15:07 Speaker 01 So talking about the fintech business, C Limited's fintech arm, as I mentioned, is called Money. And I think it was launched about 10 years after Melly launched MercadoPago, but they did so for very similar reasons, right? So Melly had this problem that it had built an e-commerce platform, but it did so in a part of the world that was still dominated by cash, meaning most people couldn't buy things on Melly's marketplace even if they wanted to, right? If you don't have a credit card or a debit card. So the most logical thing was to then build a fintech business that allowed people to pay online and become MercadoLibre customers. And as far as I know, something similar happened with C Limited and their gaming business. Is that the right way to think about it?
15:51 Speaker 02 Yep, similar problem, just with a mobile game instead of an e-commerce side. So the way mobile games like Free Fire make their money, because technically they're free to play, is by in-game purchases. And those in-game purchases are mostly weapon or character skins. People who still played Fortnite or also Counter-Strike know that. But since credit card penetration was low, it was difficult to effectively monetize the game. And because of that, Garina launched what was called Airpay. And the way it worked was that Airpay users could go to physical stores that served as Airpay counters, and then they could deposit cash and then receive that amount in the digital Airpay account. And those Airpay counters were in all sorts of small businesses, kind of similar to Western Union counters, with the difference that you don't send your money around the world,
16:34 Speaker 02 but just into your own digitized account. And you could argue that Airpay's success was the reason C Limited was even possible a couple of years later, because the monetization increase that caused it for the gaming business basically turned into the cash engine that, again, as we have discussed, was kind of subsidizing Shopee and also the fintech business in the next couple of years.
16:56 Speaker 01 So there was C Money, that's now just Money. And then it sounds like it actually started as Airpay, which sounds like what Apple Pay should be called. But this is all the same business we're referring to.
17:11 Speaker 02 It is all the same business, just many different names over the years. But it's the same business. It even gets a bit more difficult or complicated because Money runs many different services that all have different names and most of those names are connected to the Shopee name. So for example, there's Shopee Pay, which is their digital wallet, or Shopee Pay Later, which is their buy now, pay later operation, or also Shopee Partner, which is their merchant financial services arm. So a lot of different products, a lot of different names, all under the same umbrella.
17:40 Speaker 01 Well, since we're already talking about it, how about we dive deep firstly into Money before we get to the e-commerce business? I know from our episode on Meli that there were a lot of synergies between these types of businesses anyway. So I'm sure that by understanding the fintech business, that will help inform and support our understanding of the e-commerce business and maybe whatever moats they have around it.
18:03 Speaker 02 It might help when I compare Money to MercadoPago from time to time, although I got to say, they are quite different generally. So I think that will still show some similarities, but also the differences. And since both companies have similar flywheels, it hopefully also shows which one is stronger when you compare them at the end. So the first similarity is that both fintech operations are valuable in terms of data generation. So when people buy something on MercadoLibre and pay with MercadoPago, that payment data stays within Meli's ecosystem. That's what they base many of their credit decisions on today. So I think it's about more than 30% of the credit algorithm, which is based on just their own payment data, nothing that's coming from banks.
18:45 Speaker 02 Money also collects payment data from users, but obviously the payment data that it started with had significantly less value than marketplace data. So let's say someone is spending $2 on a skin and a mobile game. Well, that tells you very little about the financial situation, especially because gaming spending is deeply emotional and often disconnected from the underlying financial health of a person or a customer. And also, many players were teenagers who probably still spend their, I don't know, $5 in savings on in-game items, even when their parents' financial situation might not look too great. So yeah, I think the amount and also the category of spending aren't that useful. As a signal for making credit decisions. This is where the interconnection between the gaming business, the fintech operation and e-commerce already shows up.
19:29 Speaker 02 While the payment data from the gaming business isn't as valuable, C Limited also obviously used its gaming business to start the e-commerce business in the first place. And it was not only about subsidizing it, it was also about user acquisition. So Shopee leaned into a highly gamified approach with in-app games, live streamings and also rewards that mirror the mechanics of their Free Fire game.
19:51 Speaker 01 I think it's a really interesting point that we should go back to. I never would have thought about this, but you're absolutely right. There are certain types of transactions that are more reflective of creditworthiness than others. So if you're routinely paying off your grocery bills, that's a much better sign of how reliable you are than maybe what you're spending on a mobile game indicates. And not to stereotype too much, but if anything, I might even argue that splurging on mobile gaming shows that you have something of an addictive personality in our, you know, maybe not a great person to lend money to.
20:24 Speaker 02 I mean, that might be true. I'm sure there are patterns that they can recognize that show whether they're spent on the game. And Shopee would kind of indicate that they might have an addictive personality. So I don't know, imagine they see that your spend on important daily goods goes down, but their spend on Free Fire stays the same. I mean, that's kind of, kind of a bad signal, I guess. But anyway, when Money started its credit business, which was around 2019, Shopee already had hundreds of millions of users buying across multiple different segments. So we're talking fashion, electronics, beauty and home goods. So Money's underwriting is primarily built on Shopee purchase behavior, which is again marketplace data, which is very similar to what MercadoLibre also had. Where Shopee's data might still be slightly weaker than Money's is in the category mix.
21:09 Speaker 02 So Shopee screws more toward fashion and beauty than essential household goods, which are marginally less predictive for financial stability and how much money can actually be spent on certain goods. But this gap is certainly closing as Shopee expands into groceries, as you mentioned before, and also these higher value categories, for example, electronics. And by the way, it's not a coincidence. That shop is skewed toward clothing and beauty products because those products work well unbranded, which means that customers don't go to different sites and then compare prices. And your customers are mostly women. And interestingly, both of that is good for young ecommerce companies because women tend to buy more frequently and because, again, these products are unbranded, it's more difficult to compare prices. I also listened to a podcast by Drew Cohen
21:54 Speaker 02 and he had Fred Liu there, you know, a hedge fund manager and pretty good resource on C Limited. And he actually mentioned that women tend to write more reviews. And that's something I didn't know before. And it obviously helps any commerce platform, especially in the beginning, when you want to build trust with the buyers on your platform. Another advantage of those items and the purchase behavior is that they are higher frequency, which makes the logistics obviously more efficient. And at the same time, buyers don't really care how long it takes until the package arrives because it was more of an impulse purchase anyway. So they didn't go on the site and thought, I need a T-shirt and it needs to be there tomorrow. It's more like they saw it, they liked it, they ordered it. But you know, if it's there tomorrow or in just five days, they don't really care about that. The flip side, though, is that those types of purchases, once again, have less predictive power
22:39 Speaker 02 for a person's financial situation. So if you want to compare them, long story short, I think Meli's data has more predictive power, but that is kind of balanced out by at least to some extent, the many more data points that Shopee is accruing over time just due to the higher frequency of orders.
22:56 Speaker 01 Would you say that changes anything about how money is set up compared to MercadoPago? And perhaps the risks then that come with the credit portfolio? So for Meli, it generally seems like the biggest risk with the company is its credit portfolio blowing up at some point due to the relatively low quality of some of its borrowers. And so how does the actual credit product suite compare between the two companies?
23:21 Speaker 02 It's difficult to compare them just because MercadoPago is way ahead still. So the core of Money's credit business right now are these buy now, pay later solutions, which are embedded at the Shopee checkout on their page. So you buy something, you split the payment over installments, or you just defer to the next month. And this comes with short tenures. So generally, You're talking about three to six months, which is kind of similar for Mally, but their entire mix shift is a bit different. So again, generally it takes three to six months for the average time in the credit portfolio of money and it only has an average loan size of around eighteen dollars. That sounds tiny, but it's also kind of the best way to start such a business since many customers are first time credit users with no formal credit history.
24:03 Speaker 02 So you build a credit history very slowly and with caution, which is the best thing that you can do. Then once Money understands a user's repayment behavior well enough, it then offers cash loans. So that means larger amounts, longer tenures and also usable for anything, not just the one product that you just bought on Shopee. And then the final stage is off platform. So a user who first got credit buying shoes on Shopee can now use, for example, Shopee Pay Later to pay at a grocery store or an electronics retailer, which generally has nothing to do with Shopee. And MercadoPago has been through all of those stages many years ago and is technically just well ahead of them. And the equivalent of Shopee Pay Later, which is Mercado Credito's installment product,
24:45 Speaker 02 is already deeply mature in Brazil, in Mexico and also in Argentina. So in three pretty big markets. And the main growth driver for Pago now is the physical credit card that works pretty much everywhere. So there is no merchant integration required and about fifty percent of the transactions are already volume happening completely off the MercadoLibre platform by now. That certainly is that where Shopee or Money is nowhere close yet.
25:12 Speaker 01 And just for context for the listeners, the flywheel effect of the fintech business is obviously bigger within a company's own ecosystem. So for example, on MercadoLibre or Shopee. However, if you want to build a fintech business that can also stand on its own feet, an important measure is the extent to which people use it outside of its own ecosystem. So when you say that Shopee is not yet at the same stage as MercadoPago, I assume the off-platform share of transactions is correspondingly lower.
25:44 Speaker 02 Yes, the off-platform business for Money right now is growing fast. So the BNPL part of that is, for example, growing 300% year over year, but it is still only 15% of Money's total BNPL portfolio. So Malaysia, I think, is the most advanced market for off-platform, with about 30% of all the transactions being off-platform, which actually kind of gives you a glimpse of what Money looks like at a mature stage in other markets. And a main difference to Meli is that Money's off-platform tool is QR codes, while Meli mostly uses credit cards. And credit cards are just a more powerful off-platform tool, because a card works everywhere. You know, Visa or Mastercard are accepted with zero incremental merchant onboarding,
26:26 Speaker 02 and Shopee Pay Later requires integration with each new merchant category. So basically, Money is expanding through national QR payment systems across Southeast Asia, which is smart for those markets, since you know cash and card terminals are just less entrenched there. But it's also a slower path to ubiquity than a physical card. And you also miss out on some of the fees that you can earn if you issue the credit card that's being used. And you asked me before our episode how it's even working, you know, that you have these QR codes but no credit card. But you know, that's kind of where PICS in Brazil comes in, and many other countries, especially in Southeast Asia, have their own national payment rails. And those basically make it possible to just go from the e-wallet via QR code to the e-wallet or the bank of the merchant
27:11 Speaker 02 without ever touching any of those credit card rails. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
27:17 Speaker 01 Early in my career, I was shipping away at student loans, and it felt like it would never end. I'd make a payment, check the balance, and it barely moved. What finally changed my mindset was seeing a real finish line, a date I could actually circle on the calendar. That's what Monarch's debt paydown simulator gives you. It uses your real balances and payments to show your exact debt-free date. Then you can run different scenarios side by side, like adding an extra $100 a month, and instantly see how much sooner you'd be done. Watching that timeline shrink is really motivating, and you're the one in control of the plan. A quick check in on your phone or laptop tells you exactly where your money stands.
27:58 Speaker 01 It's so important to manage your finances and I believe Monarch can help you in doing so. Write your own money story with Monarch. Use code WSB at monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just $50. That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com with code WSB. Interested in futures trading and looking for a place to get started? With Plus 500 Futures, you can explore some of the world's most active markets, all from one easy to use platform. Trade futures on popular assets like the S&P 500, NASDAQ, oil, gold, Bitcoin, Forex and more. Whether markets are moving in crypto, commodities or indices, there's always something to follow.
28:42 Speaker 01 Plus 500 Futures is designed to make trading straightforward with a platform you can access wherever you are, right from your phone. And you can get started with a minimum deposit of just $10. Not ready to trade with real funds? Try the free unlimited demo account first and explore the platform without putting real money at risk. Backed by nearly 20 years of experience and trusted by millions of customers worldwide, Plus 500 gives you the tools to stay connected to the futures markets. Visit us.plus500.com to learn more. Trading in futures involves risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Not all applicants will qualify. Plus 500, it's trading with a plus. You don't need me to tell you that rent and mortgages are only getting more expensive.
29:27 Speaker 01 That's why Bilt created three credit cards designed to offer the richest rewards on rent, mortgage and everything else you spend on. Whether you rent or own, you can earn up to 1.25X points on every housing payment without the transaction fee, no matter where you live. Points can be redeemed for flights, hotels, Lyft rides, a future housing payment and much more. Turn one of the most unavoidable payments in your life into the most rewarding. Find the card that's right for you and apply at joinbilt.com/tip. That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T.com/tip. Use our link so they know we sent you.
30:10 Speaker 01 Terms apply, subject to approval and eligibility. Bilt cards are issued by Column NA, Member FDIC pursuant to license from Mastercard International, Inc.
30:21 Speaker 02 All right, back to the show.
30:23 Speaker 01 And what about the credit quality of their lending portfolio? That's one of the big debates when it comes to Melly's credit portfolio and New Bank too, which is the other emerging markets fintech in our equity portfolio.
30:37 Speaker 02 This is probably the most surprising part of it all and also the one that it's harder to figure out. So Money takes a lot less risk than Melly does, apparently. One of the most important metrics to check is the non-performing loans ratio, or in short, NPL ratio, which is pretty low for Shopee. So usually, there are two things that you check. You check the NPLs after 15 days and after 90 days, with the idea being that after 15 days, you kind of get a glimpse of how the new loans are performing. And after 90 days, if there's no payment made, you're kind of thinking, well, if you didn't pay anything for 90 days, most likely that loan will not perform at any time in the future. Unfortunately, C only gives us the 90-day NPLs. So Money, in terms of the 90-day NPLs,
31:20 Speaker 02 stands at just 1.1%. That's pretty low. I mean, for comparison, Melly's at 17%, and even New Bank is at 7%. However, and that's kind of the problem here, you can't really compare these numbers because C is using a different method to calculate the NPL. They generally just share much less data, which makes it pretty difficult to get a full picture of what's actually going on at Money. So just as an example, C doesn't disclose net charge-offs, so the amount it's actually writing off after the recoveries. And they also don't give you a clear net interest margin, which is pretty essential, because without those two pieces, you can't calculate what's arguably the most important metric in lending, and that's the risk-adjusted spread, or what Melly calls NIML, the net
32:04 Speaker 02 interest margin after losses. And that's the number that tells you whether a lending business is actually creating value, or it's just going for the sake of it, to make more revenue, for example. With Melly, we could look at it and say, okay, the 17% NPL looks kind of scary, but they are earning a risk-adjusted margin north of 20%. So the risk at least is being well compensated. With C, you kind of just have to take the 1.1% at face value, and then to some extent, trust. That the economics underneath are working. There's some math that you can do, which kind of suggests they have a similar margin, but it's kind of wishy washy. Like, I don't fully trust it. Now, the book is growing at eighty percent a year, and the NPL ratio hasn't moved, and usually, that's encouraging.
32:45 Speaker 02 But with C, that's kind of the problem, because there's the potential that NPLs look much lower, because new loans are masking old, bad loans, and you can't see it, because you only get the ninety day NPLs, not a shorter timeframe. I hope this hasn't been too complex. If so, maybe you just go back a minute and listen to it twice. The point being, at any given moment, you have a denominator full of brand-new loans that haven't had time to go bad yet, and the numerator that reflects the smaller loan book from several months ago, and that's kind of the problem here. There's another factor, which is mix shift. So, C's loans are mostly what I mentioned, these buy-now-pay-later loans, and the typical loan tenure, again, is three to six months, so pretty short.
33:27 Speaker 02 They have structured repayment schedules, so just way more likely that you get your money back, because if nothing is done, after one month, you will get a certain amount of money, the next month, again. So, we're not comparing like-for-like here, because Melly is deliberately pushing into these longer-duration loans, higher-risk credit-like merchant, working capital loans, and also larger personal loans. So, it's not only about buying something on MercadoLibre for twenty dollars, and then you get a BNPL solution. It's also cash loans, where they say, hey, whenever we gave you credit, you paid it back, but now we give you two thousand dollars. So significantly more money. Chop is not yet doing that to the same extent. That's a big part of why the NPL numbers are significantly higher for Melly than they are for money.
34:09 Speaker 01 I gotta say, it feels like there are some red flags here. The lack of disclosures aren't exactly inspiring, and even if it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, the NPL just seems impossibly low. So, I mean, you can't control for methodology, and while the markets they lend in are very different in some ways, these are still both emerging market countries that they're lending across, which inherently comes with a certain amount of risk that you'd expect to see reflected in the NPLs. And so, maybe you could argue that Melly's geographic exposure is more challenging, but it's still puzzling to me to see how C can have such vastly better NPLs.
34:52 Speaker 02 More than anything, the NPLs of C Limited are just a dramatically lagging indicator. So again, if you would grow your loan book by 80 to 90% a year, and we only know about non-performing loans after 90 days, that's just not great. So I'm not saying that they give you wrong numbers or they're kind of fixing them to make them better. But in theory, you could go from the 1.1% that we have today to, let's say, 4% without any signs or disclosures in between. That's kind of the risk that you're getting here. But yeah, a meaningful portion of MercadoPago's loan book sits in Argentina, which is a country where you know you have chronic inflation, a lot of regular currency devaluations, and it's just a pretty unstable market to be in. So if you're lending in Argentine pesos, for example,
35:36 Speaker 02 some degree of credit stress is almost unavoidable in any given year, just regardless of how sophisticated your risk model is. And money lands across Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, but also Malaysia, Vietnam, and Brazil, and none of which have at least Argentina's degree of macroeconomic instability. And Meli's team is not making poor lending decisions in Argentina. They're just operating in one of the hardest credit environments in the world. And I would personally not penalize MercadoPago for its NPL rate without acknowledging that context. Also, if you go into its financials, the most profitable market for them is Argentina, both in terms of their fintech operation as well as MercadoLib's of the marketplace. But again, it's not Choppys fault that Meli operates in some tough markets.
36:19 Speaker 02 Meli needs to be careful, and Choppys fintech business seems to be less risky, at least if we trust the numbers. But again, we lack the information for me to say that with 100% confidence. So I don't know if I would call that a red flag. It's certainly a yellow one and something that you have to be aware of.
36:34 Speaker 01 So if we were to try and level the playing field just to compare which model you generally think works better for the overall flywheel that's being built, looking past geographies, are there differences in the quality of how the payments businesses support that overall ecosystem?
36:52 Speaker 02 I give MercadoPago a slight edge on structural durability for two reasons. So the first is the deposit-funded model. So MercadoPago offers a money market account where users park their money, basically, in their wallet and then earn competitive yields with immediate liquidity. So assets under management in Pago more than doubled year-on-year in 2025, and they now reach almost $19 billion. And this matters enormously, at least over time, because it might give MercadoPago a lower-cost funding source for its loan book in the future. And since deposits are cheaper than capital markets funding, that's a huge advantage that you want to take advantage of in the future. So when your users are funding your loans by parking their savings with you, your net interest margin is just structurally stronger.
37:37 Speaker 02 I have to say, though, Meli isn't yet doing that. So their assets under management as a funding source, that's not something that we've yet seen. This will likely still take some time, and it's also dependent on whether they can actually get all the banking license that they want to have. Money doesn't have this at scale yet, and thus it's less of a choice for them and more of a forced decision to fund the loan book through securitization and also capital markets, which, again, is just a bit more expensive. C-Bank in Indonesia and the Philippines and Marybank in Singapore are building towards deposits, though. So C Limited is certainly going out there, getting banking licenses. So I would just assume that they have the same strategy for the long term. By the way, because they have banking licenses,
38:18 Speaker 02 I'm quite sure they have to report margins on the fintech business in the filings to those banks. So perhaps there's a way to get them, but I couldn't find them yet. If anyone has any idea where to find them or what the margins are, please say so in the comments, but it's something that I couldn't yet figure out.
38:33 Speaker 01 And the savings product that Pago offers, to a degree, creates customer lock-in as well.
38:40 Speaker 02 Absolutely. I mean, once your savings are in a financial ecosystem, you just become dramatically more loyal to everything else that system offers, right? I just don't want to push my money from one app to the next and then, you know, basically change all of the things that I do on a daily basis. So if you use the wallet for daily payments because the money is already there, that also makes it significantly more likely that you will spend money on Shopee later on. And kind of be part of the entire ecosystem and kind of have this established relationship with the brand. And you're also less likely to download a competitor's app for any financial reason. MercadoPago, on the other hand, has already achieved that kind of complete financial relationship with tens of millions of users in Latin America. Whereas Money has still a more transactional relationship yet, so people borrow from it, they repay it, hopefully,
39:26 Speaker 02 and use Shopee Pay for Shopee purchases, but it hasn't yet built this kind of last stage. So the deeper savings relationship that is creating even more stickiness for the ecosystem. I'm pretty sure, though, that it is only a matter of time until we see them having saving accounts too. Again, with all the banking licenses, there's just no way, you know, they're missing out on that opportunity. Another big advantage that Pago currently has is obviously credit card payment. So the more data Pago accumulates from off-platform transactions, the better its credit models become, and the better offers it can also make to acquire new customers. And then the more loyal customers will be in the entire Melli ecosystem.
40:05 Speaker 01 So Pago wins on deposits and with their card. Where does Money have the better of it? Where is their advantage?
40:13 Speaker 02 Probably if you look at the totally addressable market. So Money's top three markets account for over half of its digital financial services revenue, which means Indonesia is the dominant contributor. Indonesia alone has 280 million people with credit card penetration still in the single digits as a share of the adult population. And when you look at Mexico, Brazil, and how quickly the market is growing there, you can only imagine how much potential is in those markets. And the Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand are somewhat similar. So just the growth potential in all of Southeast Asia for a well-run digital lending business is generally enormous, comparable to and in some ways, again, larger than what Melli had available in Latin America. And, you know, they also just started scaling Pago.
40:57 Speaker 02 So I feel like for both of these companies, there's so much room left to grow, which is also in part why I think that them competing in some markets like Brazil is not a death sentence to any of those companies. And then you obviously have significantly less risk on the credit side for Money, at least. That's how it looks right now. Again, take all of this with a grain of salt. And we don't yet fully know how it will look in, let's say, three months when we have new numbers on the 90 days. But generally speaking, I believe Pago will keep the leadership in Brazil and South America. But I wouldn't be surprised to see Money achieve somewhat similar network and scale effects in Asia that Pago has seen in Latin America. And should there ever be a meltdown of Meli's credit portfolio,
41:37 Speaker 02 there would potentially be a chance for Money in the long term, although I definitely hope we will not see that anytime soon.
41:44 Speaker 01 The thing that's puzzling me about this company is that I agree, there's a huge opportunity to do digital lending in Southeast Asia. So then why divide your attention with e-commerce in Brazil? You know, and they're going after all these huge TAMs and are having huge success across various geographies. But I also think they might ultimately do better by focusing on a single geography or focusing on a single product market. So, you know, let's say focusing on fintech services in Southeast Asia, right? Why bother with Latin America? That's just my thought on it. But, you know, anyways, on that note, let's talk about the actual e-commerce business.
42:25 Speaker 01 When I looked at the headline numbers for C Limited in my research for Grab, there was one that really caught my eye and it was C's GMV share in Southeast Asia, where GMV stands for gross merchandise value. And that's basically the total dollar value of all the e-commerce products that are sold. And so it's supposed to be at slightly over 50%, which is just an extraordinary number for Shopee as a marketplace to hold in a region this complex and then just really to hold generally. And so for context, Amazon has roughly 38% market share in US e-commerce and MercadoLibre has a similar share in Brazil. So having 52% share in a region with over 700 million people, that is truly an incredible achievement for C Limited.
43:11 Speaker 02 Especially given the complexity of the market. So when Shopee launched in 2015, Lazada was the clear incumbent, founded three years earlier, backed by Alibaba, which had essentially unlimited capital and the world's most advanced e-commerce technology stack behind it. So Lazada had a head start in every market, established seller relationships and the operational credibility of being associated with the most valuable e-commerce company in Asia. So on paper, Shopee had no business outcompeting Lazada. And yet, only four years later, by 2019, Shopee had overtaken it to become the most visited platform in Southeast Asia. And one of the key reasons has been what we talked about in the beginning, the mobile revolution. So Lazada was built for desktop and adapted to mobile,
43:56 Speaker 02 while Shopee was designed from the start around the way people in its markets actually use the internet. So on cheap Android phones with intermittent connectivity and short sessions. The entire UX was optimized for that experience. And beyond that, Shopee introduced free shipping when Lazada still charged for it. And Shopee successfully integrated gamified elements like flash sales, like daily coins, and also in-app streaks into the process, kind of similar to what we know from Duolingo, but for shopping. And in markets where shopping apps compete for attention against TikTok and Instagram and also mobile games, that distinction matters a great deal because it totally changes how you use those apps. The other thing that Shopee did well, which perhaps doesn't get enough credit, is localization.
44:39 Speaker 02 So Lazada tried to run a unified regional operation with centralized systems. Shopee put large local teams in every market. So people who understood that what sells in Jakarta is different than what sells in Manila and that a seller support approach that works in, let's say, Singapore doesn't work in Vietnam. Today, Shopee has 20 million sellers and management reports that roughly half of them generate the primary income through the platform.
45:06 Speaker 01 So this also reminds me of something that we talked about in our TIP Mastermind Community Discussion about MercadoLibre, and that is that Shopee now has over 90% of its Brazilian GMV coming from local Brazilian sellers. And so that's a huge difference from the approach that other Asian, especially Chinese competitors have taken and chosen to do in Brazil. And so this significantly benefited them too, after the de minimis exemption was closed, which effectively made imported Asian goods pricier compared to locally produced items. And so I would bet that this also will assist in mitigating
45:47 Speaker 01 perhaps the potential political opposition that other foreign competitors might encounter when you can say that so much of your GMV is coming from local players.
45:59 Speaker 02 And the localization works perfectly. So by now Lazada isn't really competition anymore. While Lazada achieved its first profit in 2024, that was the result of a strategic pivot away from volume competition, which is what Shopee does, into more of a premium brand with higher margin official stores and also cross-border logistics from China. And as a result, its GMV has been roughly flat to actually declining. And in Vietnam and Thailand, it now holds somewhere around 3% market share. So Lazada is really no longer a meaningful threat to Shopee's, at least regional leadership.
46:32 Speaker 01 So then who are the biggest competitors to Shopee today, since Southeast Asia is a very competitive market, even if they have 52% market share there, which would sort of suggest there's no viable competitor. I know there's a lot of competitors there. So let's zoom in on that.
46:49 Speaker 02 There are certainly, certainly competitors. And if that weren't the case, I assume the market would look very differently at the latest investments that Shopee did. So the stock is currently down more than 50% from its September 2025 highs. And one of the key reasons is margin pressure from ongoing investments in the business and mostly into its logistics operation.
47:09 Speaker 01 And those are similar reasons for the decline compared with Melly, right? Melly is down 28%, though, not more than 50% with its stock price.
47:20 Speaker 02 Yes, the entire sector has been sold off, not as bad as SaaS, but it's certainly not in favor either. So in part, that's why I like the sector so much right now. We covered many SaaS companies, but looking at how quickly AI evolves, many of them just end up on at least my two hot pile. But in my opinion, the e-commerce players, they are getting punished without good reason. So there's this fear that AI will disrupt everything in the digital world. But many businesses we own in our portfolio, for example, have network and ecosystem effects that AI just can't replicate. So think of Amazon. Amazon's mode is not code. It's not the website or any part of the software, really. Amazon's mode is mostly convenience and price. It's cheaper for me to order something on Amazon than actually go out and buy it at a store.
48:05 Speaker 02 And even more important, when I order something, it's there the next day or even within just a few hours. And I don't even have to leave my house. Personally, I like to go out and get some fresh air and shop for stuff myself. But you kind of get the point, like most people like the convenience. And you know, if I can't find anything in store, it's always a huge headache. I just go on Amazon, I order it, same evening, it's still there. So it's about convenience. And that convenience is based on a huge flywheel between network effects that make sure that Amazon has all the products I need, because millions of products are offered, a huge logistics ecosystem and so, so much more. C-Limited and Melly kind of benefit from the same dynamic, even slightly more due to their payment business. And AI can help them personalize ad targeting,
48:47 Speaker 02 maybe increase the purchase frequency and also improve the risk modeling for their fintech businesses. But it can't replicate billions of dollars in physical infrastructure. And it also can't change the fact that people want to order online today and then receive a package to their doorstep, either still today, just a couple hours later, or next day. And it doesn't really bring down barriers to entry in this business either. So I do feel like this is one of the sectors that is benefiting from AI, but does not face the same threat.
49:14 Speaker 01 I am one of those people that is very much guilty of wanting to receive packages on their doorstep the next day. I am pretty deeply embedded into the Amazon product ecosystem, which was something we've joked about in the past. And now, Daniel, I'm sorry to say it's only getting worse. Amazon ran this promotion this past weekend, where, and this is not a free ad for Amazon. Well, I guess it is a free ad for them, but they're not a sponsor of the show. And so anyways, they had some initiative where you could get free delivery for a month from Whole Foods. And the only cost is the tip on top of the, you know, the actual cost of the groceries. And so I have now moved from basically ordering just stuff on Amazon Prime to now really everything I order is
49:55 Speaker 01 being delivered because now I've got this grocery subscription and I don't know if I'll keep it, but now I'm getting all my groceries delivered. And that almost feels like even for me, I'm like, this has got to be the line, right? Because there is something to be said about going and picking out your own tomatoes and apples. And you don't necessarily want someone else to do that for you. But I'm a huge fan of convenience. No, absolutely not. And you're getting back on topic. Another thing that we've talked a lot about in the past is how AI agents might change consumer shopping over time. And even in that regard, I just don't see how that could impact Amazon, Melli, or C, right? When, when I shop through an agent, that agent should still optimize for the things that I do when I shop, right?
50:40 Speaker 01 So they're going to look at customer reviews, they're going to look at price, and they're going to care about delivery speed. And so in the end, it's a means for more quickly scanning and browsing for things I care about, but it's not fundamentally making decisions on different variables than myself.
50:56 Speaker 02 Point being, I think, or maybe we think, there are few industries right now with a better value balance when it comes to AI or maybe AI proposition, right? But the original question was about the competitive landscape. Again, Shopee's market share is pretty high, but competition remains quite intense. And let's say more diverse than what Amazon or Melli face in their home markets. There are three different types of competitors. So the first one would be TikTok Shop, which is the fiercest competitor right now. And then you've got the legacy players like Lazada, and then you've got the cross-border platforms like Temu, Shawn, or even AliExpress, which kind of represent a threat that's less about platform competition and a bit more about price pressure.
51:36 Speaker 01 Well, I want to talk about TikTok Shop. And neither of us are probably the best people to talk about it because honestly, we're probably one of the only people in the world in their twenties that have never had the TikTok app downloaded on their phones. But I do know through friends and family that TikTok Shop is growing very, very rapidly in the US and around the world. And you know, I just Googled it, actually. Supposedly, there's an 18% market share in the US. And that's a big number. And you see it growing, you know, 100% year over year in 2025, after you'd already grown that by 400% in 2024. So this is a real competitor that's kind of come out of nowhere and taken over the world, not just on social media, but now on the commerce side of things, too.
52:20 Speaker 02 What's so fascinating about this competitor, from the lens of the Western world at least, is that TikTok was the first successful Chinese app in the US and in Europe. We talked about how normal social media shopping is in China and Asia, but it never worked the same way on apps like Instagram, Facebook, even live streaming platforms like Twitch. But with the success of TikTok, that kind of seems to change. So TikTok Shop has tens of millions of customers, even in the US. By now, it sells more beauty products to people in the age range of 18 to 24 than Sephora or Alter Beauty, which is kind of insane to think about. I mean, we used to own Alter Beauty at some point. So you pitched it to me. It seems to be a phenomenal business, but also seemingly, at least in that age cohort, cannot compete with TikTok Shop.
53:04 Speaker 02 And as you said, I'm not a TikTok user, so my insights are somewhat limited. Although I think that everyone who uses social media generally understands how sticky that product is. So since my episode on Meta on this podcast, for example, I realized more and more how powerful Instagram's ads actually are. I mentioned on the episode that I sometimes go to Instagram just to go through the ads because the likelihood that I find what I'm looking for on there is bigger than when I just Googled the product I'm looking for. And just in the last few months, I spent more money on products that were advertised through Instagram than I did otherwise. Doesn't matter the channel. The biggest game changer to me is the quality of brands that you find on Instagram.
53:46 Speaker 02 Now, five or so years ago, it felt like it was mostly lower quality stuff, just selling at high prices. But by now, you get really high quality stuff there advertising. I don't think there's any brand that wouldn't advertise on Instagram, maybe even MS. I haven't seen it yet, but I wouldn't say that's impossible. I mean, you see Patek Philippe and all of those brands. So there's not a single brand that I've personally felt like I would like to get something from it, but I haven't seen it on Instagram, just hasn't happened. And I could see how that is also happening on TikTok, at least over time. Of course, most products won't be the highest quality right now, but many companies are really just founded just to start selling on TikTok Shop. So to stand out over time, I expect a similar trend towards higher quality. It's not yet there, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if in five years' time,
54:31 Speaker 02 there are significantly higher quality products on TikTok Shop as well.
54:36 Speaker 01 I don't think quality is the main selling point for a lot of these products that people are shopping for on TikTok and Instagram. And, you know, Shopee is really not known for its high-quality products either, even in contrast to TikTok, but the main value add is the really low prices.
54:54 Speaker 02 That's true. I think a certain quality is important if you want to successfully expand into Europe and the US. But internationally, the focus is a lot more on price. So it's not a surprise that TikTok Shop is also growing massively in Asia. In 2022, it was essentially irrelevant, a small, you know, social shopping feature on TikTok that was not yet widely used. And just one year later, the Southeast Asian GMV had nearly quadrupled to $16 billion. And by 2024, adding in its Tokopedia acquisition, which is another huge marketplace there, which actually used to compete with Shopee, but was then bought by TikTok Shop. Now it's significantly bigger. Now you're talking $67 billion and second only to Shopee.
55:37 Speaker 02 The combined entity, so Tokopedia and TikTok Shop, hold about 28% of Southeast Asian platform GMV. So that's only second to Shopee, which is at $67 billion. So still far away from that, but they're getting there. In Thailand, TikTok Shop's GMV more than tripled year on year in the first quarter of 2025. Vietnam, it grew 150% just in the first half. So you don't gotta know all the numbers, but they're growing incredibly fast. So the speed at which TikTok has scaled, it's just generally extraordinary and a bit scary for competitors. So if you just look at the most durable success of TikTok itself, I don't think it's unreasonable to think that TikTok Shop can also grow sustainably, which is something that we haven't yet seen before. But again, TikTok used to be a trend, now it's there for a decade.
56:22 Speaker 02 So I would expect that the shop might be as successful too. The difference from legacy players, and I include Shopee here for this comparison, is that TikTok Shop is not a search-driven marketplace. On Shopee, users go or arrive with purchase intent. So they open the app because they want to buy something. TikTok is more of a passive discovery machine. Its algorithm surfaces products to users who weren't shopping in the first place through content that they were already engaging with. So a creator in Vietnam, for example, demonstrates a skincare product in a 30-second video. I hope that's how long videos on TikTok are. Then the algorithm serves it to, let's say, 200,000 viewers who follow that creator. Some percentage click through and actually buy without ever having searched for skincare in the first place.
57:06 Speaker 02 And you could argue that desktop-first e-commerce was good when you already had a product in mind. Then you search for it and compare prices. Mobile-first, like Shopee, is great when you have a general purchase intent, but you don't yet know what exactly you're looking for. And then you have this third layer, TikTok Shop, where you log in without any purchase intent. And then through the right content, suddenly, I don't know, you do buy a new lipstick. I know that's something that Sean and I do on a daily basis.
57:36 Speaker 01 We do, and that's why we were invested in Ulta, right? And I am sort of glad that we're out of that position because I love Ulta. I think it's a wonderful business. But this takeoff and growth from TikTok Shop has just really come out of nowhere. And I think there's something to be said for the fact that beauty will always have an in-person component. You're not going to spend a lot of money on makeup that you haven't tried on in-store. And you want to speak to a beauty consultant at the Ulta store who can give you recognition. And tips. So I don't know, I'm taking us on a tangent about Ulta. I still like Ulta's business, but I am in some ways a bit relieved that we have taken ourselves out of that position because TikTok shop is really just eating into the business on the lower end of the spectrum,
58:21 Speaker 01 which is an area that, you know, more price sensitive consumers, that's an area that Ulta used to dominate. And so anyways, TikTok's growth and Shopee's growth are not necessarily in direct competition with each other. The average TikTok order value in Southeast Asia is around $4.50 to $6.00 versus Shopee's $13.00 to $15.00 per order value. So we know that the most valuable purchases are intentionally being made via Shopee. And that is really, there's some value in that because it's a recurring process of needing to come back and buy these products as opposed to with TikTok, they're capturing a lot of these like very low ticket
59:03 Speaker 01 impulse purchases from consumers that happen to live in tier two and tier three cities that are scrolling for entertainment and then just happen to discover a product. So there's a degree of randomness there that doesn't make for a great compounding business. And that is not Shopee's target customer in the same way, at least in Southeast Asia.
59:24 Speaker 02 If you want to frame it positively, TikTok shop is kind of expanding the total ecommerce ecosystem rather than purely carving out Shopee's market. So some portion of those first time TikTok shoppers in tier two or tier three cities will, as their online shopping habits mature, eventually, potentially graduate to Shopee for more considered higher value purchases. And there's also some reasonable doubt about how fast TikTok shop is still growing right now, because in early 2025, TikTok shop's GMV grew about 70% year over year in Southeast Asia. And late 2025, that number dropped to 30%. And that's only modestly above Shopee's own growth, which is approximately 25%. And more notably, TikTok shop's relative market share versus Shopee
1:00:08 Speaker 02 in Indonesia, which is the region's largest market and the one that matters most for Shopee's overall trajectory, has effectively flatlined over the past. Now TikTok bulls have looked at an alternative number that suggests TikTok shop is still growing a lot. Because there's this company called J and T Logistics. It's a Southeast Asian logistics provider and TikTok's primary logistic partner. And since it is publicly traded in Hong Kong, we have some data to work with. So JT reported parcel volume of seventy four percent year-on-year growth in Q4 of 2025. So many people argue that if TikTok's logistics partner is growing seventy four percent, TikTok must also be growing at least seventy plus percent, you know, somewhere in that range.
1:00:53 Speaker 02 But when you actually decompose J and T's growth, it might not solely be TikTok volume. So start with the overall C e-commerce parcel market. And when I say C here, I mean Southeast Asia, which grew approximately forty percent in the last year. If J and T had simply held its market share flat at twenty seven percent, the level that was in 2024, it would have grown about forty percent just from writing the market. That alone accounts for more than half the headline number. But J and T did not only hold market share flat. According to its own filings, J and T's market share rose from the high twenties to thirty five percent in the first half of 2025. So that's about a six-point gain driven by smaller logistics providers exiting the market, basically unable to compete on both cost and service quality.
1:01:38 Speaker 02 And that share gain adds roughly another twenty five to thirty percentage points of growth. And then J and T also launched a new non-platform parcel business, serving traditional retailers rather than just e-commerce platforms. So when you add all those three things up, you get almost exactly to J and T's reported growth. So, point being, TikTok's own order growth appears to be closer to thirty to forty percent on volume basis and roughly thirty percent on a GMV basis, given that average order values have been declining as the platform goes deeper into low-ticket commerce.
1:02:14 Speaker 01 Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. You know that sinking feeling when a meeting ends, everyone's nodding along and two days later, you realize that nobody wrote down who was doing what? That's why I use Granola. Granola is an AI-powered notepad that makes your meeting notes useful. It captures what happens in your meetings and it turns it into clean, structured notes with decisions and action items pulled out and made easy to find. On days with back-to-back calls, like guest prep and team check-ins, community calls, I used to spend the gaps cleaning up messy notes and trying to remember who owned what. Now I stay in the conversation and weeks later, everything is searchable in one place.
1:02:56 Speaker 01 Once you try it on a first meeting, it's hard to go without. You can try it totally free. Head to granola.ai/wsb. That's granola.ai/wsb to get your time back. Go to granola.ai/wsb and try it on your next call. Interested in futures trading and looking for a place to get started? With Plus500 Futures, you can explore some of the world's most active markets, all from one easy-to-use platform. Trade futures on popular assets like the S&P 500, Nasdaq, oil, gold, Bitcoin, Forex, and more. Whether markets are moving in crypto, commodities, or indices, there's always something to follow. Plus500 Futures is designed to make trading straightforward with a platform you can access
1:03:41 Speaker 01 wherever you are, right from your phone. And you can get started with a minimum deposit of just $10. Not ready to trade with real funds? Try the free unlimited demo account first and explore the platform without putting real money at risk. Backed by nearly 20 years of experience and trust by millions of customers worldwide, Plus500 gives you the tools to stay connected to the futures markets. Visit us.plus500.com to learn more. Trading in futures involves risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Not all applicants will qualify. Plus500, it's trading with a plus. This September, I was in New York for the Intrinsic Value Conference. The talks were great, but what I kept thinking about is what happened around them.
1:04:24 Speaker 01 On Friday night, about 20 of us crowded around a long table at a family-style Italian spot near Times Square. Saturday, we did it again. And Sunday morning, a group of us were still debating Socrates over breakfast before everyone headed home. Many of the people at those tables had only known each other from our calls in the Mastermind community. That is the community I host with Kyle Grieve and Daniel Manca. Each week, we get together on live calls to dig into markets and individual businesses. We bring in fund managers, operators, and authors as guest speakers. And a few times a year, like New York this fall and Omaha every spring, we meet in person. If you want to think in decades alongside people who do the same, apply for free at
1:05:09 Speaker 01 theinvestorspodcast.com/mastermind. If your application stands out, I'll be the one to reach out to you personally. All right, back to the show. Is there anything else that suggests the competition is perhaps stabilizing rather than intensifying?
1:05:25 Speaker 02 There's one more data point that I find quite telling, and it's about pricing behavior. So when Shopee increases its commission rates or transaction fees, TikTok Shop typically follows within days. And that kind of synchronized pricing behavior, where a second-place competitor kind of mirrors the leader's price increases, rather than just holding flat to steal share from it, is basically a signal of rational competitive dynamics and not irrational aggression to basically gain market share at the cost of the other competitor. So a generally hungry competitor trying to take share would either hold rates or even go lower with them. And that's what TikTok is not doing. So I would say that suggests that Shopee and TikTok have both kind of eyeed profitability in that market.
1:06:09 Speaker 02 So I think that's a generally positive sign for their competitive pressures there.
1:06:14 Speaker 01 So we've talked about fintech being so important to the businesses of MercadoLibre and Seed Limited. Is there a payment arm to TikTok Shop? I don't think there is. It's just social media and this marketplace for shopping. But it's interesting to me that they don't have a fintech arm, it seems.
1:06:33 Speaker 02 It might come with time, but currently TikTok Shop has no equivalent to, let's say, Shopee, Pay Later, or just any BNPL solution. So there's no embedded credit product, and there is no digital wallet that it controls. In Indonesia, it relies on GoPay and a third-party BNPL provider. So you're seeing a tendency to go into that market, but they don't have anything on their own. So in Vietnam and Thailand, it has just no meaningful payment infrastructure. And then, building a credit underwriting business from scratch, I mean, all the regulatory licenses, the risk models, the default prediction algorithms trained on behavioral data, all of that just takes close to a decade. We kind of forget that when we look at Shopee and Melly and all these companies that have done it. But it was a long time how they do it. I mean, money started in 2014
1:07:17 Speaker 02 and only hit its stride around 2019 to 2020. So TikTok would basically be starting from zero in 2025, and this creates, you know, switching costs. Shopee has it, TikTok, in my opinion, cannot replicate quickly. So I do think that's a huge advantage for Shopee. It's also a huge advantage for Melly in Brazil. Not so much for Amazon, but I mean, Amazon compared to TikTok Shop, I think that's a pretty clear bet on Amazon.
1:07:41 Speaker 01 I want to briefly go over Lazada again, because we haven't talked about enough businesses today. But because you said it's in retreat, and I want to understand why, because this would have seemed like the obvious winner perhaps six to seven years ago. And I can't imagine any Alibaba shareholders would have thought that Lazada would eventually retreat and give up billions of dollars of potential business in this space. And I say that to tease you a little bit, because I know that in the past, you've been a Baba Bull, Daniel. So I know you know better than I do.
1:08:14 Speaker 02 Unfortunately Lazada wasn't a huge part of my thesis, but I'm sure that Lazada was part of many Alibaba bull cases back then, especially in the mid teens. So it was founded in 2012, three years before Shopee, and Alibaba acquired it in 2016, so four years later, for roughly a billion dollars and has since invested several billion dollars more. So it's not about the money they spent on the acquisition, but more about the investments that they did over time. And at peak, it had Alibaba's logistics experience, obviously the technology stack, and also the cross-border sourcing relationships, which are quite important because getting goods from China into Southeast Asia is a pretty good way to make high margins for yourself. So by any rational analysis, Lazada should have held the market, and yet it lost pretty decisively, to be honest.
1:08:59 Speaker 02 Lazada had multiple leadership changes, six different CEOs between 2012 and 2023. This has kind of been a red flag even back when you looked at that business, because you just thought if they changed the CEO every second year, something there has to be off culturally. And apparently that's true. I mean, there were culture clashes between local Southeast Asian management teams and Alibaba's executives, and that instability just fed through strategic inconsistency from year to year. But the deeper issue was a product mismatch. So Alibaba's model from China, which was heavy first-party inventory, centralized logistics, top-down category management, was also used for Lazada. But this just wasn't the right approach for Southeast Asia. So Shopee's full third-party, seller-centric,
1:09:44 Speaker 02 and hyper-local model, which we talked about, was simply a better fit for the region.
1:09:49 Speaker 01 So there was a CEO carousel at Lazada, it sounds like. I mean, that six different CEOs in 10 and a half, 11 years is crazy. And we haven't even talked about the cross-border wave of players that came into the picture, like Timu, Shine, and AliExpress, and how they have impacted the competitive landscape.
1:10:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, let's add even more businesses to today's discussion. So this is a different kind of threat and Shopee's position relative to it is actually stronger than it might appear. So in the US and Europe, Temu operates as a standalone platform that crushes local retail on basically price and by shipping directly from Chinese factories, kind of what I mentioned with Lazada and Alibaba back then. In Southeast Asia, Shopee itself has already built a large cross-border program years ago. So Chinese sellers listing on Shopee and shipping to regional buyers has been a meaningful driver of Shopee's low price positioning for a long time. So Shopee essentially got ahead of the Chinese cross-border wave before Temu even arrived.
1:10:49 Speaker 02 That said, Temu has been building a presence in some countries in Southeast Asia and also in Brazil. It's somewhat relevant there. I would still say if you look at the market share numbers, it's mostly about Shopee and Mally. And especially after you had these diminutism exemptions put out of place, it got a lot harder for companies like Temu or Shawn to get into that market. But critically, Shopee's domestic Brazilian GMV, so local sellers selling to local buyers, is insulated from these worlds, which is a huge advantage in that market. And this is one of the reasons Shopee's multi-year investment in onboarding Brazilian sellers, rather than just relying purely on Chinese supply, has been strategically important and basically gave them the market share they currently have in Brazil.
1:11:33 Speaker 01 I guess the most important question is the same one that we asked with MercadoLibre. And that is, with Shopee currently investing quite heavily, expanding their logistics, building fulfillment, launching their version of Amazon Prime, is it doing so from a position of strength? Or are they doing this because they have to, right? They have to invest this capital to remain competitive.
1:11:55 Speaker 02 If I had the answer to that question, Sean, I would have 100% in either buying the stock or I'm selling it short. But the market has become concerned that the investment cycle is defensive and that the margin compression that we're seeing is a necessary response to TikTok competition, rather than a voluntary choice to just strengthen the mode for the long term. And the terminal margins might therefore be structurally kept close. One or two percent of GMV rather than four to six percent of GMV, which makes a huge difference for the terminal value of the stock. So with Melly, I'm quite confident that concern is largely mistaken. Of course, I can only assess the risk that currently exists. So if Amazon announces tomorrow that they will invest $20 billion in Brazil, that would change things, but it doesn't look like that.
1:12:39 Speaker 02 So for Shopee, you can make similar arguments. If TikTok shop's growth were generally accelerating and taking meaningful share in, for example, Indonesia, you would expect Shopee to be cutting prices and subsidizing growth to defend its position, which is exactly what it did in 2022 and 2023, when competition generally intensified. Instead, though, Shopee is raising take rates and investing in infrastructure. So those are not the actions of a company under siege, I would say. So they are the actions of a company that believes its competitive position is secure enough to spend on capability rather than on defense. And there's also a pattern of observe and then act in C's history that we've also seen with Melly to some extent, and we talked about it.
1:13:24 Speaker 02 So before money scaled its lending book dramatically, it kind of waited for some time. It watched the Indonesian digital banks that had rushed into consumer credit, start blowing up with non-performing loans. And only after competitors stumbled and the data kind of showed others had mispriced risk, did money accelerate aggressively on investing in those markets, gathering customers and market share at a point when the field had kind of thinned out. So C has a tendency to press hardest when competitors are weakening, not when they are strongest. And the current investment cycle, to me, looks more like that pattern than it looks like a desperate defensive response.
1:14:03 Speaker 01 And there's a broader question here about whether competition in e-commerce structurally leads to margin suppression. Because the TikTok bear case is not just about market share. It's about whether Shopee can ever earn real profit margins that drive excess returns on capital that creates shareholder value in the midst of a competitive market.
1:14:24 Speaker 02 This is where it's worth looking at China. China is the most competitive e-commerce market in the world. You have four large, well-capitalized platforms, all competing heavily with Alibaba, JD, Pinduoduo, and ByteDance's own Dooee in commerce. And despite that four-way competition, all of them are earning approximately 2% EBITDA to GMV margins, and that's actually three times higher than Shopee's current 0.7%. So the lesson from China is that competition and profitability are not as tightly correlated as the bear case might assume. What matters more is coordinated rationality, whether all the players in the market eventually face economic pressure to earn a positive return. In China, they did, and the industry settled at respectable margins.
1:15:09 Speaker 02 It's not the same that Amazon earns, which is probably active in the most profitable market you can be in, but it's good enough. So there's no reason to believe that Southeast Asian commerce, once it matures, wouldn't follow a similar path. So Shopee, again, has 0.7% margins today, based on GMV, and if you would assume that this market can grow somewhere to the stage of China, perhaps with a bit less competition, slightly higher, there's a lot more room to grow your earnings and margins.
1:15:36 Speaker 01 To recap, the overall competitive picture here is that there's a dominant platform, and there's a real but decelerating threat from a fintech-less challenger in TikTok, and then you have a retreating incumbent in the legacy space, and then there's this cross-border dynamic that Shopee is at least reasonably well-positioned to handle, I'd say.
1:15:57 Speaker 02 With the important caveat that Vietnam is also a huge factory and shouldn't be dismissed, because Vietnam shows what TikTok can do when it fully commits to a market, and basically the defensive variables, so logistics staff, fintech lock-in, seller ecosystem, inertia, they're all less entrenched. So the question every Shopee investor needs to have at least a view on is whether the Vietnam dynamics are propagating to Indonesia, which again is this significantly more important market for Shopee. I would say the data so far says they're not. Indonesia's competitive dynamics have been considerably more stable than in Vietnam and TikTok's share gains there have been much more modest again over the past year.
1:16:38 Speaker 02 They've kind of flatlined in terms of market share, but it bears watching every quarter because Indonesia again is forty four percent of the regional market. And this is basically deciding over whether Shopee will be successful here or not, at least in the long term. So what I would say about the overall competitive position that we kind of end this chapter here is that Shopee today looks more like MercadoLibre in twenty twenty two than in twenty nineteen. So it's a profitable, structurally dominant platform, managing real but kind of bounded competitive pressure. So there are competitors, but it kind of feels like an oligopoly right now. So then investing in infrastructure from a position of financial strength rather than desperation seems to be the right idea.
1:17:18 Speaker 02 And the period of existential uncertainty, which Shopee generally went through twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three, I mean, look at the stock chart that we'll talk about it later, is kind of over. So what remains is the hard work of executing the logistics and fintech flywheel in markets that are still early in the e-commerce penetration curves. And that's a much better problem to have.
1:17:38 Speaker 01 Well, let's talk about the flywheel because it's not always easy to see how all of these different segments reinforce each other, especially the payment operations that tend to be quite complex. And it just takes some time to be able to determine whether they are a strength for the business or a risk to the business where you're taking on all this lending and credit risk. That has the potential to blow up in a downturn and adds some fragility, but also it can strengthen the underlying business. So there's a tension between these two things. And when we covered MercadoLibre, one of the most compelling aspects of really the thesis is this part where MercadoPago complements the marketplace and they reinforce each other, right?
1:18:20 Speaker 01 You know, MercadoPago drives more marketplace spending in short. So how does that dynamic compare with what C has built? Is there as much of a positive synergistic relationship for their side of the business?
1:18:37 Speaker 02 In parts, I would say. So perhaps we should start with Garina, the gaming business, since that is a part of the flag where that Meili, Amazon, Alibaba or Kuipeng just don't have. Again, at its peak, Garina had hundreds of millions of daily active users across Southeast Asia, but also Latin America. And those users, primarily young, male, mobile-first, are a natural audience for Shopee. Again, like these young cohorts they focus on primarily. See actively cross-promoted at that time. So in Brazil specifically, Free Fire's enormous popularity in the country gave C somewhat of a brand presence and also a user relationship before Shopee even launched there. So it's one of the most unusual market entry strategies in ecommerce history, at least from the ones that I've seen. You go in through a video game,
1:19:22 Speaker 02 establish trust and brand recognition, and then convert gamers into shoppers on a totally new ecommerce side.
1:19:30 Speaker 01 Wow, that's fascinating. I mean, it seems brilliant, but perhaps that's also the benefit of hindsight, speaking here, because, you know, I'm not sure that I would have bet on that working in the US, because mobile games just don't have a ton of staying power and probably would have much less success, at least in the US, converting players to something that is really completely unrelated, right? I can't imagine wanting to, you know, buy my groceries through a company that I also played my mobile games with.
1:20:01 Speaker 02 There's no doubt, everything I say now is with a huge hindsight bias. But with that hindsight bias, I would say there is a good reason actually why this works in emerging markets, but not in developed markets. So once again, the mobile-first nature of emerging markets plays a huge role here. I don't play any games on my phone, for example. Playing games was for me only something that I did on a console or my PC, and it's also probably 10 years ago. But most people in emerging markets have skipped desktops. So playing a mobile game and then switching to your social media app or an ecommerce app just a second later feels way more normal to them. So of course, the game itself and Shopee are different apps, so it still takes some time to switch from one to the other. And it's not like you're already halfway through a buying process whenever you open Free Fire. But Shopee is the place where you buy.
1:20:46 Speaker 02 Buy in-game currency, for example. So there's a reasonable bridge between the game and the marketplace. And for example, you see a new skin while you play the game, right? You want to buy it, you go over to Shopee, you buy some credits, you go back to the game, you get the skin, and that's kind of how a transaction can look like. There were also some offers in Brazil, which I found pretty smart. When Shopee first entered the market, where you could get free skins when you sign up for Shopee or bought specific products. So there were certainly some cross-selling opportunities. And if I think back to my 15-year-old self, if I really liked the video game and I got free skins, if I sign up for some marketplace, I would have certainly done so.
1:21:24 Speaker 01 And it's important to note that Money, right, M-O-N-E-E, their fintech business, plays a role here too, right? So for example, a player could then use Shopee Pay later on Shopee to pay for the credits that are then going to be used while playing Free Fire.
1:21:42 Speaker 02 Exactly. That's one of these scenarios. Of course, the connection to the video game is not as strong from a mode perspective because it only benefits players of the video game. But every other Shopee customer obviously has similar benefits through Money as MercadoLibre shoppers when they use MercadoPago. So it works very similarly, and the gaming business just adds a bit more stickiness to C's ecosystem for the people who do actually play the game. So as we said earlier, the most valuable transaction data comes from normal shopping behavior, not transactions for a video game. And then beyond that, you have the same closed loop that we've seen with Meli. So better credit data enables more lending. More lending means more purchase power. More purchase power means higher GMV for Shopee, and higher GMV means more credit data.
1:22:26 Speaker 02 Management has actually said in, I think it was the Q4 call of 2024, that off-Shopee loans now account for about half the loan book in the Asian markets, meaning Money is expanding well beyond the platform it started on. And that's not yet the case in Brazil, but in parts of Asia. And generally, I should say that Money doesn't seem to be as competitive as MercadoPago is. So the main focus is to strengthen the overall Shopee ecosystem. And MercadoPago and the credit business, on the other hand, they are supposed to be the key drivers for growth and profitability for Meli in the future. I don't see the same importance of Money for Shopee.
1:23:03 Speaker 01 One thing I do want to talk about quickly is the stock's enormous volatility, which I think can be partly explained by this boom and bust cycle we've seen after the pandemic for really a lot of e-commerce businesses, right? During the pandemic, Shopee benefited from this huge uptick in online shopping. And then Garina's games benefited from, well, everybody being stuck at home and not having much else to do other than gaming. And then you had money which benefited from the acceleration of digital financial services adoption. And all of that led the stock to rise from around $40 at the start of 2020. So this all time high of $370 in late 2021.
1:23:46 Speaker 01 And then when it became obvious that this 100% annual growth couldn't persist, you saw a massive multiple rerating around the entire company and then the stock dropped accordingly. But you know, you told me before that this is not really the only reason why C Limited struggled so much. So what else was going on during this time?
1:24:09 Speaker 02 One of the other things that happened is that India, which had been one of Freefire's fastest growing markets, banned the game in 2022 as part of a broader crackdown on apps with perceived Chinese ties. So Given C's partial Tencent ownership, that basically wiped out $16 billion from the market cap in just a single day. And then there were also these pandemic tailwinds that reversed. Obviously, you just mentioned that. So Garina's quarterly active users dramatically dropped and Shopee had really been burning cash aggressively across multiple new markets. So with the game being down, which is the cash cow of the business, and Shopee burning a lot of money on expansions, for example, it launched in France and Spain and Poland and Mexico, among other markets, those experiments were just not working out and the market just didn't like it.
1:24:53 Speaker 02 And as if that wouldn't be bad enough, Tencent also started selling about $3 billion of its about $20 billion total stake in C Limited. And it is still the largest holder today with about 17% ownership of the company. That's, by the way, economic. I think their voting shares are about 10% of the company. But the fear back then was certainly that Tencent might just sell even more of their stake.
1:25:15 Speaker 01 And how did they rebound from all that?
1:25:18 Speaker 02 Basically, a decision that we discussed very briefly in our Melly episode. So the CEO, Forrest Lee, chose to stop the expansion strategy and focus more on the core markets. So C Limited pulled out of France, Spain, Poland, Mexico, a lot of the South American markets as well, except for Brazil, and then concentrated capital on the main markets. So Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia, Taiwan, and the only market left in Latin America, which was Brazil. And they also just cut costs aggressively. There are stories about the company literally switching from single ply toilet paper in the offices to kind of signal a culture of frugality. I gotta say, that would have been a no-go for me, but honestly, I mean, C needed to show that it can operate profitably. And if it takes, you know, single ply toilet paper, and that's what they need to do.
1:26:02 Speaker 02 So thousands of jobs were also cut. Maybe that was also a part of the cost-cutting measures, maybe more impactful, but they certainly did turn around the business. I mean, in 2023, there was the first profit. It was not a lot, it was about $160 million, but it got a bit better the year after that. We talked about almost half a billion dollars, and last year, they generated over one and a half billion dollars. So more than a triple of the prior year, and all three business units, which is also kind of important, were profitable on an adjusted EBITDA basis. You don't really like adjusted EBITDA, but at least you're getting there slowly.
1:26:33 Speaker 01 And so the stock did recover significantly, even though we are, once again, in a somewhat similar situation with the stock just being beaten down, down 50% from the most recent highs that were made last September. So anyways, I want to ask you more about Brazil specifically, because this is such a key market to a number of companies we're monitoring, right? New Bank, MercadoLibre, and C Limited. I know part of the reason you wanted to cover C is to really better understand one of Melly's biggest competitors. And it's just interesting, because a couple of years ago, I don't think anybody would have thought that Shopee had any chance here and that they would fail, just like most of the other e-commerce players that had tried to come into Brazil.
1:27:15 Speaker 01 But you fast forward two to three years, and Shopee is selling more items in Brazil than MercadoLibre and has almost exclusively local sellers on its platform, which is another real point of strength for them.
1:27:28 Speaker 02 It has been pretty astonishing what Shopee achieved in Brazil over time, especially if you consider that they pulled out of all other Latin American markets. So at least everything beyond some cross-border activity in some of those markets. But Brazil is so interesting because it's just a massive market and it feels like a home game for many Asian e-commerce players. It's much more similar to Asia than, for example, Europe or the US. So Amazon kind of learned that the hard way. While I have no doubt they still could take this market if they wanted to, it just makes no sense. They would probably need to outspend Meili or Shopee by a factor of 10, simply because they have to change their model entirely to fit this specific market. And that just wouldn't be a high return on investment at all. So that's why it doesn't make sense for them. But for players who are native to these sorts of environments,
1:28:12 Speaker 02 Brazil is a huge opportunity. It has a population of over 215 million people. Many of them are in the age range of 20 to 40. And you have an urban concentration of 87%, which is actually a lot higher than I thought. This matters for the logistics ecosystems, right? Because you don't have to go into these areas that are far away from the city and a lot more difficult to deliver to. It's also a $2.5 trillion economy and e-commerce penetration is still only half of that of the US, Europe or Asia. So you can easily expect a double-digit growth tailwind just from the industry going overall. Every listener who listened to our Meili episode knows all of that.
1:28:48 Speaker 01 You mentioned that Free Fire was also used as a customer acquisition tool. And apparently it was a huge success in Brazil as well. And thus, players and consumers already knew the C Limited brand when Shopee dropped in Brazil, right? So I'd imagine that helps a lot.
1:29:05 Speaker 02 The game had been enormously popular there for about three years before Shopee launched. So Brazilians already knew the C brand, even if they knew it through a game, not a shopping app. And Sao Paulo's internet cafes in 2017, apparently Free Fire was the most played game. So C had an affinity amongst Brazilian youth that most foreign e-commerce entrants had to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire. So when Shopee launched, it had a brand shortcut and nobody else in the market could match that.
1:29:33 Speaker 01 And how would you say Shopee's Brazilian position looks today?
1:29:37 Speaker 02 Shopee is considered one of the big three, together with Melly and Amazon. Although only Melly and Shopee continue to take market share. So Shopee currently stands at about 15% market share. MercadoLibre stands at 35% to 40%, depending on which number you pull. So Shopee turned it just a little bit positive in Brazil in 2024, although it would still look different if you account for overhead costs. And Brazil was described as the fastest growing market in 2025, faster than any other Southeast Asian market. But Melly's Brazilian marketplace is structurally more mature. So it's been profitable for way longer and is running at much higher absolute margins. So Melly's contribution margins in mature markets, which is mostly Argentina, they exceed 40%.
1:30:20 Speaker 02 And Brazil's e-commerce business for Melly is not yet at that level, but it is significantly ahead of Shopee. The key gap right now is average basket size or average order value. So Shopee's AOV, average order value, in Brazil is significantly lower than Melly's due to Melly's strength in mid to high value categories such as branded goods and electronics. And for those shoppers, what matters most is delivery speed and offering branded products. So Shopee reduced buyer waiting time in Brazil by one and a half days year over year. And in the big cities, Shopee already has a sizable logistics operation, but the major differences are outside of the big cities. So Melly's network covers all major population centers.
1:31:01 Speaker 02 So you're talking Sao Paulo, Rio, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, and many more, while Shopee has only three fulfillment centers. One in Sao Paulo, one in Recife, and one in Guaná. So even though Shopee already covers half the space that Melly covers through its logistic network, it's very concentrated. And some estimates guess that Melly covers close to 40% of Brazil's population and about 50% of its GDP with their logistics operations, while Shopee covers only 14% of the population and 17% of the GDP.
1:31:34 Speaker 01 And what about Money in Brazil? I guess it's also far behind based on your assessment that even in Southeast Asia, they'll not be able to reach the level that MercadoPago has in Brazil.
1:31:45 Speaker 02 Yeah, in Brazil, Shopee Pay Later penetration is, as management put it, still in very early stages. So comparable to where Indonesia was years ago, Money customized their product for Brazil, notably users share a single credit limit across Shopee Pay Later and cash loans, which is kind of different from how they do it in the Asian markets. And Brazil also has more credit bureau data available, which kind of makes it easier for them to assess the risk of the users. But generally, it's just significantly smaller. So the growth has been strong and consistent. Management said that they expect Brazil to be one of the faster growing money markets, Money in terms of their fintech arm, going forward. In the meanwhile, though, MercadoPago in Brazil is already multiples of the size, growing rapidly still.
1:32:29 Speaker 02 And I think in the long term, the dominance on the payment front will help Meli to keep the dominant position, also for higher quality goods on the marketplace.
1:32:38 Speaker 01 It's only taken us an hour and a half, so we're making breezy work of this, right, Daniel? But yeah, let's talk valuation. I think it's, I think it's time to pull it all together.
1:32:46 Speaker 02 All right, so the three segments have very different margin profiles. And that's actually one of the most important things to understand about this investment. So Garina today operated roughly 50% EBIT margins. Again, it's the highest margin part of the business. It's capital light, obviously. And Money is running at about 25x EBIT margins, although we have to make a lot of assumptions here because again, we don't have a lot of data. And Shopee, I'm modeling in my model at about 6% EBIT margin near term, expanding to 12% by 2030. So I do expect them to grow and also stop their investments at some point. And that would kind of work out to roughly 0.78% EBIT on GMV in the early years, and then basically doubling by 2030.
1:33:30 Speaker 02 That's slightly lower than what all the companies achieve in China. So I think it's realistic. And again, if you would look at Amazon or Meli, they're in the 4% to 6% range of EBIT to GMV. And the timing is a different story. I could very well imagine that she keeps investing for a while, and we still see the mature margins only later on, let's say in 10 years' time. But for today's model, I kind of have to assume that in five years' time, the most significant investments are behind us. Otherwise, we would just depress margins and earnings for the entirety of the model.
1:34:02 Speaker 01 And what do those assumptions produce when you look at them in aggregate?
1:34:07 Speaker 02 Total revenue compounds at about 20% annually up until 2030, which is actually below what the business has been doing in the past. And then if we apply an exit multiple of 20 times EV to net profit, so we're taking the market cap and we basically subtract the cash, which I think is kind of conservative for a company that is still going at those rates that I assume you would kind of get a fair value of roughly $140 per share today. And with a 20% margin of safety, the intrinsic value target is about $111. So $85 today, that implies a compound annual return of approximately 15% if the base case plays out. If you also account for the cash that would be earned in the meantime, assuming no more aggressive reinvestments in the business,
1:34:51 Speaker 02 you could also argue that the EV is kind of lower and that you would get a high return. But you know, I'm not doing that to over complicate, to make model even more complex. I gotta say though, if we don't assume any bear case scenarios, meaning a credit shock or a sudden shift in popularity of Free Fire, or maybe just a significantly faster expanding competitor, be it TikTok shop or anyone else that we don't even know yet. I do believe C Limited is quite attractive here. That said, we mentioned how we wanted to limit our exposure to emerging markets. And by now, we might also just want to limit our exposure to e-commerce platforms in general. So when I compare C to Melly, C is certainly cheaper, but I also believe that Melly is just the better business overall. And for a company that we buy based on our expectations of future growth,
1:35:37 Speaker 02 I would always choose business quality over valuation. Nevertheless, again, I do think C Limited here looks quite attractive.
1:35:45 Speaker 01 I definitely have mixed feelings because yes, we do want to limit our exposure to these higher risk markets and business models to keep a balanced portfolio. But we also want to make sure that we're making the best bets, right? So I do see Melly as the better business between the two, while C offers a more favorable valuation today, you could probably say. So there is this classic question that arises of hanging up for a wonderful business or getting a discount. On or maybe a marginally less wonderful business to dramatically oversimplify things. And Buffett, I think, would tell us to go with the former. So who am I to argue with him? But seriously, the non-performing loans in their lending business, those numbers feel off to me.
1:36:30 Speaker 01 And I would really want to better understand their lending business before I could get comfortable with investing in C Limited. And I also don't love that at the moment. The cash cow is this mobile gaming business where it's not like they have an empire of diversified games that are all popular. You're banking on one game to fund much of the entire business. So that feels incredibly fragile to me in a way. The vast majority of games out there have fleeting popularity. And so Free Fire is not a fad. It is something special to it. But point being, the games that people want to play can change on a whim. And you're competing with really a mind numbing number of competitors that are all trying to build the next hit game and coming at you, right?
1:37:15 Speaker 01 So very, very intense competition around your cash cow. And so also, you know, the lending business is just not as impressive as Melly's and has some questions around it. The gaming business is extremely concentrated. And then you have them dividing their focus across two continents for e-commerce, competing against companies like Melly that are singularly focused on only being the best at serving Latin America. And then on top of all of that, their e-commerce business seems so much more precariously positioned to me because they're competing with TikTok on impulse purchases as opposed to being really the go-to destination for essentials, right? I talk about how much I love my Amazon Prime subscription. I have recurring monthly orders for toilet paper and paper towels on Amazon and that
1:37:59 Speaker 01 kind of stuff, plus a bunch of other reasons, is what keeps me coming back consistently into their ecosystem. And that makes me certainly much less likely to ever churn, but also to spend more money with them. And so, you know, when your business is built on low-ticket items and impulse purchases, sales volumes can just naturally swing dramatically on a whim. You can get really, really rapid growth, can also get, you know, really rapid decline. And so all that. Being said, I would sleep better at night knowing we own Melly, which we do, rather than allocating part of our portfolio to C Limited. And so maybe I'll come around on C Limited after I finished up my research on Grab and looked at the company from another angle. And that is a little teaser for one of our upcoming pitches. If we haven't teased it enough already today,
1:38:44 Speaker 01 we will be digging into Grab in an upcoming episode. But anyways, I'm very much happy to pass on investing in this business for the time being.
1:38:54 Speaker 02 That's my Charlie Munger moment now. Nothing to add. I think we delivered about 100 minutes to our listeners where they can make their own picture of C Limited. I agree with all of it. I think for me, C Limited seems like a great business, but for us mostly it's now about having the positions compete with our new ideas. And you know, the one it mostly competes with here is obviously Melly. And I do believe that Melly is a better business, a bit more focused, further in, you know, strengthening its mode and its flywheel. And I personally prefer that. So without making it two hours here, I want to end today's episode with a person who to some extent has started it, Steve Jobs, in the speech that inspired Forrest Lee to start C Limited. Jobs said, "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life." I feel like that's one of
1:39:38 Speaker 02 the best quotes you can use to end an episode. And with that, see you in the next one. Have a good day.
1:39:44 Speaker 00 Thanks for listening to TIP. Follow the Investors Podcast on your favorite podcast app and visit theinvestorspodcast.com for show notes and educational resources. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not provide financial, investment, tax, or legal advice. The content is impersonal and does not consider your objectives, financial situation, or needs. Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal, and past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Listeners should do their own research and consult a qualified professional before making any financial decisions. Nothing on this show is a recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell any security or other financial product. Hosts, guests, and the Investors Podcast Network may hold positions in securities discussed and may change those positions at any time without notice. References to any third-party products,
1:40:29 Speaker 00 services, or advertisers do not constitute endorsements, and the Investors Podcast Network is not responsible for any claims made by them. Copyright by the Investors Podcast Network. All rights reserved.
Previous TIP815: Lyn Alden on Why Fiscal Dominance Changes Everything Next TIP817: Simple Investing Beats Complexity w/ David Fagan Page updated November 6, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
