Sea Limited

Good morning and good evening. Welcome to the Sea Limited third quarter 2022 results conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note this event is being recorded. I'd now like to turn the conference over to Ms. Minju Song. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to SEAS 2022 Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. I'm Minjoo Song from SEAS Group Chief Corporate Officer's Office. Before we continue, I would like to remind you that we may make four looking statements which are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties and may not be realized in the future for various reasons as stated in our press release. Also, this call includes the discussion of certain non-GAAP financial measures, such as adjusted EBITDA and net loss excluding share-based compensation. We believe these measures can enhance our investors' understanding of the actual cash flow of our major businesses when used as a complement to our GAAP disclosures. For our discussion of the use of non-GAAP financial measures and reconciliation with the closest GAAP measures, please refer to the section on non-GAAP financial measures in our press release. I have with me these Chairman and Group Chief Executive Officer, Forrest Lee, Group Chief Financial Officer, Tony Ho, and Group Chief Corporate Officer, Andrew Wang. Our management will share strategy and business updates, operating highlights, and financial performance for the third quarter of 2022. This will be followed by a Q&A session in which we welcome any questions you have. With that, let me turn the call over to Forrest.

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We recently passed our five-year IPO anniversary. The rest of the management team and I have learned a lot from running SEED as a public company. a journey that has seen deep highs and lows. I'm grateful for the support and advice all of you have given us over the years, and thank you for your patience and faith in us. Given the significant uncertainties in the microenvironment, we have entirely shifted our mindset and focus from growth to achieving self-sufficiency and profitability as soon as possible. without relying on any external funding. We are adapting quickly to the changing climate because we believe that companies that fail to do so may not survive. All our efforts are directed to ensure that sea not only survives the micro storms, but emerge stronger, more efficient, and more resilient, and as a long-term winner in our market. This positions us to continue capturing the long-term potential for our businesses and markets and to deliver strong and sustained shareholder returns over time. Over the last quarter, we took decisive actions to improve margins and set clear goals and priorities for the quarters to come. In addition, to emphasize our commitment to the state's goal, I announced in mid-September that the management team will stop receiving cash compensation until we achieve self-sufficiency. To share more color on our plan to achieve self-sufficiency, I would like to discuss our current view of a few financial metrics at the group level that we believe may have relatively important effects on our bottom line and cash position. First, as adjusted EBITDA, Our group total adjusted EBITDA improved by 29% quarter-on-quarter. This meaningful improvement was a result of better profitability from both our e-commerce and digital financial services businesses. I will discuss this in greater detail later. Second, capital expenditure. Historically, our CapEx has mainly related to servers, office space related spending, as well as logistics-related real estate and equipment. In the third quarter, our group CapEx was $232 million, consisting mainly of servers and logistics-related spending. This may fluctuate from period to period due to the nature of the expense. For example, during some earlier periods, we committed to a heightened level of investment in our server capacity. This was done in anticipation of future business needs while considering potential delays in server procurement due to the supply chain disruptions earlier. These earlier commitments were partly reflected in our CapEx for the third quarter and may continue to impact our financials for the coming quarters. However, in line with our current focus, we have taken strong measures to tighten our CapEx budget and will manage it with a strong focus on efficiency and the investment returns over the long run. Another metric that may cause fluctuation in our cash flow from period to period is changes in working capital. This may continue to fluctuate due to many factors such as timing of billing and the payment collection cycles. However, in the long run, the direction is also clear for us to focus on improving working capital management. Last but not least, it goes without saying that we are very focused on our cash position, as at the end of the third quarter, cash, cash equivalents, and short-term advancements was $7.3 billion, representing a net reduction of $485 million from the end of the second quarter. We aim to continue to maintain a net cash position after budgeting for the full retirement in cash of the outstanding convertible bonds and assuming no external funding. I'm confident in our ability to execute well against our stated goals, as we have demonstrated so many times in the past. Let me now take a moment to talk about some of the specific steps we have taken to improve our bottom line. We have completely overhauled our budgeting practice to consistently and comprehensively review our spending. Across all businesses and markets, we reviewed and reduced high count, decreased existing spending and future investment commitments on office space and logistics facilities, and tightened travel and entertainment policies. On top of that, we improved procurement policies and procedures reduced spending on computer hardware, and stopped all new financial equity investments. We have also accelerated cost-saving initiatives in our business operations. For example, at Shopee, we have meaningfully scaled back marketing expenses, especially around shipping subsidies. At Garena, we are now focused on running our existing key franchises as efficiently as possible and are taking a more selective approach to developing and launching new games to prioritize the highest potential titles in our pipeline. Finally, at C-Money, we have deprioritized offline adoption of Shopee Pay and further diversifying funding for our credit business across multiple sources. Our current initiatives are designed to further fortify our leading position and enable us to continue to win in our key markets over the long run. In the coming quarters, we will continue to focus on improving key financial metrics for the long-term health of our business. While our results may fluctuate and affected by the macro environment and many other factors, we are currently working towards adjusted EBITDA breakeven for Shopee overall by the end of 2023. We believe our strong focus on cash flow and achieving self-sufficiency as soon as possible is the right strategy to pursue at this stage, even though we may see no growth or even negative growth in certain operating metrics in the near term. To be very clear, we remain highly confident about the compelling long-term growth prospects of our businesses and markets. Once we achieve self-sufficiency, we will be in a position to decide to re-accelerate growth again in a much more efficient and long-term sustainable manner. Let's now discuss each business segment in detail. Beginning with e-commerce, we made significant progress in narrowing shoppiece losses across all regions, despite headwinds from ongoing micro uncertainties and reopening trends. Adjusted EBITDA loss in the third quarter was $496 million. improving quarter-on-quarter by 24%. This was driven by strong top-line growth, particularly in core marketplace revenue, and meaningful efficiency improvements in operating costs across our market. These improvements were partially offset by severance and early lead termination-related costs, and increases in HQ costs, such as shared R&D staffing and shared server hosting expenses. as we began more focused efforts on optimizing HQ costs, including R&D costs. From the later part of the third quarter, we expect savings on shared costs to start to show in the following quarters. Gap revenue in the third quarter was $1.9 billion. This includes around $1 billion of core marketplace revenue, mainly consisting of transaction-based fees and advertising revenue and therefore offering higher margins. The core marketplace revenue increased by 54 percent year on year, contributing meaningfully to the improvement in monetization and overall profitability. We aim to continue to create more value for our sellers and buyers and expect monetization to positively correlate to their satisfaction over time. As mentioned, we also further optimize the cost during the quarter. with a positive effect on our bottom line. For example, Shopee's gap sales and marketing expenses in the third quarter decreased by 15% quarter on quarter, as we adjusted our free shipping offerings across several markets. These initiatives have accelerated Shopee's path towards profitability. During the quarter, our Asian markets recorded an adjusted EBITDA loss of $217 million. improving by 31 percent quarter-on-quarter as a result of profitability improvements across all markets in the region. Additionally, the region combined recorded a positive contribution margin in line with our previously shared expectations. At an individual market level, we recorded positive contribution margins for most of our Asian markets, including our largest market, Indonesia. Furthermore, Malaysia and Taiwan recorded positive adjusted EBITDA. For our other markets combined, adjusted EBITDA loss was $279 million, improving by 16% quarter-on-quarter as a result of increased monetization and cost savings. In Brazil, We saw continued improvement in unit economics with adjusted EBITDA loss per order before allocation of HQ costs at $1.03, an improvement of roughly 40 cents from the previous quarter. Meanwhile, GAAP revenue grew by over 225% year-on-year. We will continue to invest in the exciting opportunities we see in our Brazil market. I recently spent time in the country meeting with local sellers and buyers, and I was reminded once again of Shopee Brazil's strong and clear value proposition in empowering its local communities. This drives a strong and clear business case to continue to invest prudently in that market. Of course, every investment will be made with discipline and a strong focus on continual efficiency improvements to reach profitability. Overall, as we pivoted towards focus on monetization and profitability, we have continued to see healthy buyer and seller engagement across our platform. We believe this reflects the value we deliver to our communities. In the third quarter, we observed solid retention rates for our active buyers and maintained our average order frequency and the time spent for active user at a stable level compared to the previous quarter. The number of brands on Shopee Mall also continued to grow strongly by 36% year-on-year to over 42,000, reflecting more brands recognizing the value Shopee brings to them. Importantly, we are always looking to further improve the services we offer our sellers and providers superior shopping experience for our buyers. We want to make sure that incremental monetization is well justified by additional value we continue to create and deliver in our ecosystem. Over the past few quarters, we have enhanced the efficiency and the predictability of our delivery, improved the complaint resolution rate of automated customer services, and reduced the refund resolution time. Our sellers now enjoy more features to help them navigate our ecosystem more easily and increase their sales. For example, they have access to pricing recommendations if their item prices are detected as non-competitive and have self-service access to our many performance enhancement programs and business management tools. Moving on to digital entertainment. Garena continues to be impacted by reopening trends, especially as our gamers return to fully reopened school and work post-pandemic. At the same time, we are faced with rising global macro uncertainties. We believe this continues to impact consumer discretionary spending, including in games. These tense winds has resulted in weaker engagement and the user trend in the third quarter. During the quarter, gap revenue was $893 million and the bookings was $665 million. Garena's quarterly active users reached 568 million with 52 million quarterly paying users. Our paying user ratio and our pool remains stable quarter on quarter. Free Fire experienced ongoing moderation in engagement and monetization. Still, relatively to the industry overall, Free Fire's performance remained robust. We are also pleased that Arena of Valor delivered solid growth in active users and bookings for the third quarter. It has been encouraging to see the game's resurgence once again and the strong support from a resilient core user base. Its performance in the past six years since launch is in line with our view that strong operations can have meaningful positive effects on the game and that a strong mobile game can be built into a long-term franchise with multiple peaks. For Garena overall, with the worsening macro environment and the reopening having a continuing impact on our market, we now expect bookings for the full year of 2022 to be between $2.6 billion and $2.8 billion. Looking ahead, we will focus on stabilizing our large existing franchises while selectively launching new games and investing in our pipeline with greater discipline and a stronger focus on efficiency and returns. At the same time, we will be strengthening our organization and carefully optimizing our spending through more efficient marketing and content investments. Finally, moving on to our digital financial services business. In the third quarter, C-Money's gap revenue reached $327 million, up 147% year-on-year. At the same time, adjusted EBITDA loss decreased by 57% year-on-year to $68 million. The improvement was predominantly driven by more targeted sales and marketing spending for the mobile wallet business and our credit business maintaining its healthy profitability while generating cash for the group. With the growing volatility across our market, we are closely monitoring the health of our credit business and our loan book. As of the end of the third quarter, our loan book stood at $2.2 billion, net of allowance for credit losses of $253 million. Non-performing loans passed due by more than 90 days represented less than 4% of our total gross loans receivable. And the weighted average tenure of loans outstanding was about four months. We will continue to focus on improving the quality of our underwriting, optimizing risk controls, and user experience, diversifying our sources of funding for the credit business, and improving the quality of our other digital financial offerings to users. In closing, while we have demonstrated our strong execution and ability to scale rapidly in the right market and microenvironment, We believe we are also able to adapt to the current conditions swiftly and demonstrate our ability to manage towards profitability. The cadence of bottom line and cash flow improvements may vary quarter to quarter, but we are confident that we are becoming a more resilient and efficient business in a better position to capture the long-term opportunities present in our market. With that, I will invite Tony to discuss our financials.

Thank you, Forrest, and thanks to everyone for joining the call. We have included ZICO financial schedules today together with the corresponding management analysis in today's press release. And Forrest has discussed some of our financial highlights, so I will focus my comments on the other relevant metrics. For the overall, total gap revenue increased 17% year-on-year to $3.2 billion. This was mainly driven by the increased monetization of our e-commerce business and the growth of our credit business. On e-commerce, our third quarter GAAP revenue of $1.9 million included GAAP marketplace revenue of $1.6 billion, up 39% year-on-year, and GAAP product revenue of $0.3 billion, up 3% year-on-year. Within GAAP, core marketplace revenue, mainly consisting of transaction-based fees and advertising revenues, was $1 billion, whereas value-added service revenue, mainly consisting of revenues related to logistics services, was $0.6 billion. E-commerce adjusted EBITDA loss was $496 million. As we continue to improve our monetization by creating more value for our users, and further optimized on cost efficiency. Digital entertainment bookings were $665 million and gap revenue was $893 million for the third quarter of 2022. Adjusted EBITDA was $290 million. We continued to experience ongoing moderation in engagement and monetization with the reopening trends and uncertain macro environment. Digital financial services gap revenue was $327 million, an increase of 147% year-on-year from $132 million in the third quarter of 2021. Adjusted EBITDA loss was $68 million, compared to $159 million for the third quarter of 2021. We recognized a net non-operating loss of $9 million in the third quarter of 2022 compared to a net non-operating loss of $13 million in the third quarter of 2021. We had a net income tax expense of $65 million in the third quarter of 2022, which was primarily due to corporate income tax and withholding tax expenses. As a result, Net loss, excluding share-based compensation, was $374 million in the third quarter of 2022, as compared to $448 million for the same period in 2021. At the end of the third quarter of 2022, we had $7.3 billion of cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments on our balance sheet. With that, let me turn the call to Mingzhu.

Thank you, Forrest and Tony. We are now ready to open the call for questions. Operator?

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touch tone phone. If you're using a speaker phone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. In the interest of time, we will take a maximum of two questions at a time from each caller. If you wish to ask more questions, please request to join the question queue again after your first questions have been addressed. At this time, we'll pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question comes from Pang Vit from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much for the opportunity and good afternoon, all the management here. Two questions from my side. Firstly, on Shopee. As you're now expecting Shopee break-even by end of next year, can you provide a bridge from the current EBITDA loss to your break-even target? How do you plan to get there? What is the biggest driver here? Revenue increase or cost cut? And what kind of top-line growth do you expect? Are you willing to sacrifice market share if your competitor doesn't follow suit? And second one on gaming, have we seen any sign of stabilization for Free Fire? And at the same time, we have seen news of the termination of partnership with Riot Games as well. How does it mean for your publishing business going forward? And is there any implication for the ROFR agreement with Tencent?

Thank you, Pen. Regarding the e-commerce break-even timing, as we shared, of course, these are the goals that we are working towards while taking into account macro environments and fluctuations in results and other factors may or may not be in our control. But overall, I think the trend, as indicated in our third quarter results, has been that we are both improving on the top line and also on the cost efficiency side. So on the top-line side, as we disclosed, we've increased our take rate, and in particular, the core marketplace revenue. And also on the cost side, we have tightened our expenses related to sales and marketing, especially around logistics. This is not just about reducing logistics subsidies, but overall improving logistics costs for the entire ecosystem such as on a per-order basis, logistic costs continue to decrease. And that's a very clear direction to continue to work towards. At the same time, we also, at the company level, focused more on overhead and other costs and purchases and procurements, et cetera. So this is coming from all directions. And in terms of the drivers, we continue to believe that what we continue to positive trends on both the monetization funds and also the efficiency and cost improvement funds. Some of these savings probably came later this quarter and will continue to show in the following quarters. In terms of the impact on market share, et cetera, I think from what we have so far observed in the market, we continue to maintain our strong market leadership and our peers also have behaved in a relatively rational manner. Now, a lot of these is not individual to us, but generally we are responding to the macro trends and environments that we believe is the right thing to do for us. So we will try to at this point, continue to focus on improving our cost efficiency and improving our financial metrics health for the long-term success of the company. As we also shared, our views, while there are near-term headwinds from the macro developments, our view and confidence in our market's long-term growth potential remains as strong as before, given the positive demographic trends and low penetration in our markets. And therefore, whatever we're doing now is still to best position us to be a long-term winner in these markets and in our businesses. In terms of free fire, we continue to see headwinds impacting our user number and engagement, as well as monetization. which is reflected not only in our third quarter results, but also reflected in our revised down guidance for the full year. Of course, our efforts continue to focus on engaging with our user base and provide the best content and community engagement to them on Free Fire, which remains to be the biggest franchise in our portfolio. In terms of publishing, as we always shared before, we focus both on game development and publishing as two key contributors of our game business. And the recent termination of the, as we announced, League of Legends partnership with Riot, as a result of the expiry of agreements, had no effect on our overall publishing business, as the contribution is immaterial from the particular game. We really celebrated the 10-year partnership we had with Riot, and we think it's a very fruitful partnership and success for both partners. And we also look to continue to work with top game developers around the world to strengthen our publishing pipeline. Also, this decision is a rights decision and has no relationship to anything regarding the right of first refusal agreement. What we have is 10 cents.

The next question comes from Alicia Yap from Citigroup. Please go ahead.

Hi, thank you. Good evening, management. Thanks for taking my questions. I have two questions. First is, do you expect any headwinds on the core marketplace revenue given the challenging macro environment? So will brands and merchants actually cut back the spending on advertising on Shopee? And then secondly, on the sustainable long-term revenue, level once Shopee reach EBITDA profit, what could be the margin profile, the rough margin range that we should expect the Shopee business can be? And then just lastly, on the Brazil and LATAM, will you further scale back on other country and then on near term only focus on Brazil going, I mean, for the near term? Thank you.

Thank you, Alicia. In terms of any headwinds on full marketplace revenues, so far as we increase the take rate across various service offerings and sellers adopt more of our programs and pay higher advertisements and also some of the opt-in programs to Shopee. we continue to see sellers' response to remain positive and they continue to invest in the platform as we shared before, that our focus is on delivering more value to the sellers and our buyers so that they continue to grow their business in a healthy and profitable manner on our platform, and B, they cherish the partnership with Shopee. Now, of course, we are mindful of the potential macro headwinds that might, over time, more deeply affect our region and the market as a whole. And this might affect, for example, people's purchase power, discretionary spending, and at certain points might also have a more pronounced effect on our platform and overall e-commerce in the region. When that happens, that could have a negative impact also on our ability to monetize. So that is something that we are mindful of, and we're doing everything that we can to help our sellers improve their service offerings to the buyers. Eventually, I think our success depends on the success of our sellers and our buyers' enjoyment. of the services and the goods we partner with our sellers to offer to our buyers. In terms of the margins for Shopee, as we shared, there are mainly two components in our marketplace revenue. One is the core marketplace revenue. The other is value-added services. What is core marketplace revenue? That's mainly transaction-based fees and advertisements. We believe the margin for this portion of the revenue in the long-term steady state could potentially be more in line with what you would normally see for a pure play marketplace type of business model. For value-added services, that may consist of logistics services, including logistics services, which is mostly last mile, logistics that we provide as a first party and also third party logistics that we provided on our platform that we mapped as a result of our service model to our sellers and buyers to improve the user experience. And as a result of that, from a debt accounting perspective, we do recognize debt revenue on a close basis. Now, because this revenue is mostly related to logistics services, these will be more reflective of potential logistics services type of margin in the longer run. And our focus is continuing to improve the cost efficiency of logistics services for our ecosystem as a whole, whether through our own first-party provider services or our partnership with all the third-party logistics providers to overall reduce the cost and provide a better, higher quality service to our users. In terms of our other growth markets, as we shared earlier, that we believe Brazil continues to be a very important growth market for us as we see very clear value proposition Shopee is offering to the local communities. And we will continue to invest in the market with a strong focus on returns and efficiency. We also continue to have presence from a cross-border perspective in the remaining market At this point, we have no plan to make further changes to the current approach.

The next question comes from Thomas Chong from Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Hi, good evening. Thanks, management, for taking my questions. My first question is on short P as well. Given that on a constant currency basis, The GMV actually is going at 21% on a year-on-year basis. I just want to get some color from management. How should we think about the GMV outlook in coming quarters or 2023? And given that the online penetration is still low, so I just want to get some color from management, the long-term perspective on the GMV side. And my second question is about the online game as well. I think we have talked about . I just want to get management some thoughts with regard to our game pipeline. Should we expect there would be more new games to be released in 2023? Thank you. Thank you, Thomas.

Regarding the GMV growth, as we shared before, at this point our focus is very clearly on improving monetization and to achieve self-sufficiency. So GMV growth will be an output until we get to that point. And then we can reassess our situation and see what's the best path forward Now, as I shared also, our long-term prospect, I'll give the long-term prospect of the market is unchanged. The short term, there will be a lot of factors, including macro environment, inflation, forex, and, you know, continuing reopening trends, as well as tough comparisons during COVID, and our own focus on efficiency, cost management, and improving monetization of the platform. So there could be impact on some of the top line growth in operating metrics. There could be no growth or negative growth. And we can accept that. But on the other hand, as we shared, our long-term view is we want to emerge as the strongest winner in this market. In terms of the GAIN pipeline, We do have games in our pipeline from self-development as well as publishing. As usual, we don't discuss specific games that we haven't announced or brought on yet, but there are always things that we are working to.

Our next question comes from Piyush Chowdhury from HSBC. Please go ahead.

Yeah, hi. Thanks a lot for the opportunity. And two questions from my side. Firstly on Garena, could you share a bit of light on what factors are attributing to this change in guidance? Because your bookings stood at around 2.2 billion in nine months, while your lower end of the guidance is 2.6, implying almost 40% drop in bookings quarter on quarter. So can we understand what could drive such higher slowdown in bookings in fourth quarter versus third quarter? That is first. Secondly, your net change in cash position was around $485 million in third quarter. Can you give us a breakup of how much was used in cash CAPEX, how much was due to change in working capital, and how much was due to lending, you know, funds used in lending? Thank you.

Thank you, Piyush. In terms of the game guidance, as we share, we continue to see headwinds impacting our markets from both the macro environment, in particular inflation affecting discretionary spending, including spending on games, as well as forex and overall weakness. I think that's also impacting game industry as a whole. So while we're working on user engagement and the quality of our games, we also want to give a more reasonable picture based on the information that we have now regarding our outlook for the fourth quarter. I think this is something that we continue to observe, and the direction is clear, but on the other hand, there are many factors beyond our control. In terms of the cash flow, For the improvement, as we shared, it's driven mostly by the EBITDA improvement across our, in particular, our e-commerce and digital financial services businesses as a result of better monetization as well as cost efficiency improvement. In terms of CapEx and working capital, they may fluctuate, both may fluctuate from quarter to quarter, as we shared earlier, for many reasons. For example, on the CapEx side, for us historically, these are mainly office buildings, servers, and logistics-related leases, and machineries. On the office side, I think we are continuing to manage our headcount. That will also reduce the office needs required for our employees and will reduce also renovations going forward. That also reduces computer hardware that we might need for employees. In terms of the servers, As we shared, we are tightening our budget for servers and try to more closely project the numbers based on our business needs. Previously, we did have heightened the spending on servers and in line with our projection of future business growth, but also to take into account of the previous supply chain disruptions globally that affected server procurement timetable. Some of that impact might affect us in the coming quarters as well. When exactly that might hit is not certain yet because that depends on delivery timing, bail timing, et cetera. Similar things for working capital. Overall, it doesn't have a very significant impact on our cash flow, as we shared. EBITDA is a major component of that. But changes in working capital can have fluctuations from time to time, again, based on billing and payment cycles, et cetera. But in the long run, however, this is something that we continue to focus on to improve our working capital. So something that both the K-PACs and working capital is something that we control and focus on in the long run, but I would think quarter-on-quarter analysis might not be too relevant. In terms of the lending business, as we shared, we have about $2.4 billion of gross loan books and more than $200 million of for losses, credit losses. So that represents about a little bit more than 10% of our gross loan book outstanding and the 90-day past due is around 4% and with our tenure for outstanding loan book is around 4 months. So overall that gives you a sense of how much that is included. And also in the G&A expenses discussion, our earnings relief, we did also break out and talk specifically about the credit loss in terms of P&L impact. So you can track that as well.

The next question comes from Jiang Xiao from Barclays. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much for taking my question. I have two follow-up questions around your e-commerce business. For the EBITDA laws for Q3, you talked about the one-off severance costs and the early termination of the leases costs. Would you be able to quantify that impact for Q3 and how we should think about that for the current fourth quarter? The second follow-up question is, competition, there seems to be a deceleration in recent quarters and the month. And you talked about the macro, you talked about the sort of cost-cutting initiatives. I was wondering if you could potentially talk about competition impact, if any, from a particular competitor. It seems that one particular competitor has been particularly aggressive in the region. Thank you very much.

Thank you, John. In terms of the severance and early termination, lease termination expenses, we did discuss that at a group level, that's about $77 million. Most of that is attributable to e-commerce related, so you can get a rough sense of the size. In terms of the competition, I think as we continue to track our peers as well in this region, we believe our relative leading position has been maintained in the third quarter. Of course, we take competition very seriously and we make sure that our service offerings remain competitive and our monetization intake rate is well justified by the additional value we're offering to our buyers and sellers. in line with the overall market movements.

The next question comes from Venugopal Gare from Bernstein. Please go ahead.

Hi. Thanks a lot for the opportunity. So two questions from me. Firstly, given all the new slow that we have seen on cost actions taken Could you just highlight to us how our employee headcount looks like at the end of quarter three versus what it was, let's say, in Q2 and Q1 end? And more importantly, what kind of overall quantum of cost we've been able to sort of take out from the system and how much of it, you know, is yet to reflect in our overall numbers? That's the first question. My second question is, you know, more related to the investments given the sort of cost focus now, especially the couple of areas. One is Digibank side of things. I just wanted to understand how a rollout plan is shaping up in Singapore and if it could lead to any cost increases near term. And secondly, on Shopee Express, how does the focus on cost sort of lead to any shift in strategy towards that? Because that also requires quite a bit of investments going forward. Thanks.

Thank you. Regarding the employee headcount management, the way we approach it is not a top-down or targeting a certain percentage of an employee kind of exercise. The way we approach it is more of an initiative by initiative, function by function, unit by unit, project by project assessment. to look at what is the right amount of resources we might need for the immediate business needs as well as the ongoing business, projected business needs, and what we want to prioritize on and what we might de-prioritize. So the recent headcount management is mostly related to market exits, de-prioritization of certain business initiatives. For example, as we mentioned, the Offline Payment Initiative, and also right-sizing in different functions and teams to make sure we have a strong organization and run efficiently. This is an ongoing exercise. As a result, we may continue to have some of the severance costs associated with the quarters because some of these started in the late part of the third quarter and go into the fourth quarter. The cost savings also will show in the following quarters. But again, our view is that in the long run, the cost savings is more from having a more efficient organization, having a better culture to run things efficiently and focus on returns on investments, and having a better discipline to running the entire organization in terms of resource allocation and investment into future business initiatives and projects. as opposed to the specific numbers you might hear from quarter to quarter. In terms of our investments in digital banks, I think at this stage we are still at a very nascent stage and we have started some pilot programs for the Meribank in Singapore opening up limited features to employees. We work very closely with our regulator to make sure that things are going well according to the plan. On the other hand, it's a long-term initiative. We do not expect any immediate significant ramp-up in costs relating to that. In terms of in-house logistics, for Shopping Express, this is last mile delivery services. So most of the expenses on that front is more related to staff and vehicle rentals and then some pieces of last mile hubs that we want to place those pretty close to our buyers, where our buyers are. So these are more OPEX kind of expenses that we can rent up and down in line with the business model. relatively swiftly as opposed to long-term significant paychecks. So the way we want to run it is to ensure that Shockey Express continues to remain very competitive and overall reduce the cost of delivery for our buyers and work very closely also with other third-party service providers to continue to reduce costs and improve delivery quality and efficiency.

The next question comes from Ranjan Sharma from J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.

Ranjan Sharma Hi. Good evening, and thank you for the presentation and the opportunity. Two questions from my side. Firstly, on your financial services, with the close to 60 percent reduction in losses on a year-on-year basis, should we also be thinking about potential break-even, EBITDA break-even of financial services next year? Second question is on your other services. Adjusted EBITDA losses are up 140%. Can you please share more details what's behind that and whether we should expect that to reduce in the coming quarters? Thank you.

Thank you, Rajan. In terms of the DFS business, as we shared, the reduction in losses maybe came from our tightening on the spending in terms of investments in the wallet, mobile wallet initiative. And we will continue to focus on efficiency. And given currently the loss is at a very manageable level, as we continue to improve on cost efficiency and monetization over time, we believe that this business is something that is much of a long-term that we need to focus on quality as opposed to scale of growth as rapidly as possible and rapid monetization. So we want to make sure that our business model is resilient, including the credit business in terms of the underwriting quality, user experience, operational efficiency, And also in terms of a banking business, again, it's a very much of quality, trust, resilience-focused business. So we don't expect a lot of fluctuations in this business, and we don't see it at this point as a business that we focus growth on. In terms of profitability, aside from the other services, Our adjusted EBITDA increase was, I think if you look at the quarter on quarter, it's much smaller. And lots of it is actually also related to severance costs that we initiated in the third quarter relating to the food delivery business. So if we take into account adjusted for that cost, I think the trend probably is in a different direction. But in any case, we continue to manage the cost efficiency and growth efficiency of the other services, and we expect to see more savings to show up in the following quarters there.

The next question comes from Varun Ahuja from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.

Yeah, hi. Thanks for the opportunity. My first question is on the gaming side. If you look at second quarter, there was some stability in the user base. Third quarter, again, we have seen an 8% quarter-on-quarter decline. So if you can help us understand what is happening there, is it The new users last three, six months were coming to the platform. Is it the older user base? In which regions? So if you give some clarity on that front. And related to gaming business, given the reduction in guidance compared to the, say, suppose mid-year, the last quarter, what are the negative surprises that you see on that business for you to bring down the guidance and not give more clarity on the business? Secondly, On the overall outlook or guidance, presumption of guidance, what data points are you looking at in terms of markets? So when can investors expect the resumption of the guidance from the company? So which all in terms of hardcore data points that you want to look at before resuming the guidance? Thank you.

Thank you, Varun. In terms of the game guidance, as we shared, right now we continue to see impact on user engagement and user base from the macro headwinds. And also, we see that in Q3, where school reopens fully, there is also quite a significant impact on some of the user base and user engagement numbers. That's why we revised the guidance lower. In the longer run, how this will trend, I think it still remains to be seen. Of course, as we also shared regarding Valor as an example, it's a six-year-old game and we started to see some new growth in the game six years since its launch. So we believe that after you reach the core user base and for very long-term gains with the right type of operations and efforts, there could be potential upside to the game and that can prolong the performance. Now for Free Fire, it still remains to be seen. where the core user base might be reached. And so our focus is on continuing, again, in terms of providing the best experience as we can to our users. In terms of the guidance for the future, as we shared, given the macro uncertainty, At this point, we do not intend to provide guidance for business. So if our view changes about the macro and operation, we will update the market then.

The next question comes from Josh Levin from Autonomous Research. Please go ahead.

The first question is on Garena. How much visibility do you have into Grainer's bookings and EBITDA? Or asked another way, how can investors be confident that management can accurately forecast Grainer's bookings and EBITDA over the next year or so? The second question is, can you provide a bit more detail on what is in the DFS loan book, what kind of loans are in there, and what you might have done to change your underwriting policies given the macro uncertainty? Thank you.

Thank you, Josh. As we shared just now that we are not providing guidance for business including bookings for digital entertainment given the macro outlook. In terms of the digital financial services, we have various products across different markets relating to the credit business including final player products, loans to our buyers and sellers and factoring to our sellers. So we will continue to improve our underwriting quality by reviewing the data and also by looking at cycles, information, macro information, taking into consideration as many factors that we can, but also past track record of user and user behavior to project potential shifts in user patterns and adjust our underwriting policies accordingly. And also as we shared, Average tenure for loan outstanding is four months, so it's a relatively short tenure at this point, and we will continue to act swiftly to manage our loan work with quality and focus on user experience. Thank you.

Due to time constraints, this concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Minju Song for any closing remarks.

Thank you all for joining today's call. We very much look forward to speaking to all of you again next quarter. Thank you.

The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.