Just when it looked like the largest of Southeast Asia¡¯s internet firms was yet another poster child of cheap money, a bubbly startup that had grown too much too fast, Sea Ltd.¡¯s top executives took an ax to costs.
They closed down some Latin American operations, cut jobs, sacrificed their own salaries and squeezed nearly $500 million out of the promotional expenses at their e-commerce unit.
The result? A surprise quarterly profit for the company, the first in its history as a publicly traded firm since 2017. Shopee, the popular e-commerce wing, made the turnaround possible. It went from a nearly $900 million cash loss a year earlier to an Ebitda of almost $200 million in the December quarter.
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