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spk09: For operator assistance throughout the call, please press star zero. And finally, I would like to advise all participants that this call is being recorded. Thank you. I'd now like to welcome Ms. Minju Song to begin the conference. Please go ahead.
spk13: Thank you. And hello, everyone, and welcome to CEE's 2023 fourth quarter and full year earnings conference call. I'm Minju Song from CEE's Chief Corporate Officer's Office. Before we continue, I would like to remind you that we may make forward-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. We believe these measures can enhance our investors' understanding of the actual cash flows of our major businesses when used as a complement to our GAAP disclosures. For 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 SEAS Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Forrest Lee, President, Tress Wang, Chief Financial Officer, Tony Ho, and Chief Corporate Officer, Yanjun Wang. Our management will share strategy and business updates, operating highlights, and financial performance for the fourth quarter and full year of 2023. 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.
spk15: Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining today's call. I'm happy to share that we have achieved our fourth full year of annual profit since our IPO. In 2023, we achieved profitability, strengthened our market leadership for our e-commerce business, grew our digital financial services business and stabilized the performance of our digital entertainment business. We have emerged with a much stronger balance sheet with our cash position increasing to $8.5 billion as of the end of 2023, demonstrating the discipline and the prudence we have applied in our investments over the past year. Looking ahead, We expect 2024 to be another profitable year. Let me recap our performance at the individual business level in 2023 and share the key strategic focus for each business in 2024, starting with Shopee. First, Shopee's investments since July last year have paid off. I'm pleased to report that despite an environment of intensified competition in Southeast Asia, we believe we had a meaningful gain in market share between the start and the end of 2023. We are happy to have solidified Shopee's market share in the region, and we intend to maintain our market share in 2024. We expect Shopee's full-year GMV growth to be in the high-teens range, and its adjusted EBITDA to turn positive in the second half of this year. To return and strengthen our competitive advantage, Shopee's three operational priorities in 2024 are improving service quality for buyers, enhancing the price competitiveness of our product listings, and strengthening our content ecosystem. On service quality for buyers, we'll do more to optimize key aspects of the buyer's experience such as delivery speed and consistency, return and refund processes, and customer service. These are areas we already excel in and will continue to improve on. On keeping our product listings price competitive, we will continue to work more with sellers who have more upstream supply chain access and provide more fulfillment marketing, and shop management services to our sellers. On content, we will deepen and broaden engagement with creators, sellers, and partners across the content ecosystem and better integrate live streaming and short-form video into the shopping experience. Let me now highlight some of the Shopee's achievements in the first quarter. During the quarter, Shopee delivered strong results with both top-line growth acceleration and bottom-line improvement. Shopee's GMB and orders grew 29% and 46% year-on-year and 15% and 13% quarter-on-quarter, respectively, resulting in solid market share gains across our markets. Meanwhile, Shopee's adjusted EBITDA loss improved by 35% sequentially. Adjusted EBITDA loss per order improved by 43% quarter on quarter. On logistics, we opened five new sorting centers and 385 new first and last mile hubs across our Asia markets and extended our logistics network further to improve our coverage. Through more automation, tighter planning, better routing, and other operational improvements, our platform logistics cost per order in Asia decreased by 12% year on year in the fourth quarter. This was partly driven by our own logistics network cost per order decreasing by 20% from the same period last year. We are also seeing good progress made on delivery speed. In Indonesia, in December 2023, more than half of the orders from buyers in Java were delivered within two days. We will continue to improve logistics service quality in terms of both speed and consistency. At the same time, we are also expanding premium services such as next-day delivery and introducing new features. For example, we commenced return on spot services in Indonesia and Vietnam. This initiative has resulted in higher trust and increased purchase frequency from our buyers, particularly those who are new to Shopee. Our e-commerce logistics network is now one of the most intensive and efficient in our market. and a strong competitive mode for us. We have rapidly ramped up live streaming e-commerce, which accounted for around 15% of our physical order volume in Southeast Asia last December. With the scale and the leadership achieved, unique economics of the segment also improved meaningfully quarter on quarter. Shopee Brazil continued its strong performance in the fourth quarter. Its contribution margin loss per order improved by nearly 90% year on year. This was driven by improvements in both user monetization and cost efficiency. We believe we have achieved cost leadership in logistics through scale and operational efficiencies, which have been and will be key to our success in the market. Turning to our digital financial services segment, C-Money has delivered a strong year in 2023, primarily attributed to our consumer and SME credit business. Our journey to build the credit business dates back to 2019. We initially started by introducing as pay later consumption loans in response to Shopee buyers' strong need for such services. Subsequently, we extended our offerings to cash loan services to both buyers and sellers on Shopee. This underscores our user-centric approach and the unique advantage offered by the Shopee ecosystem for C-Money to quickly achieve critical scale and profitability. 2023 was the first year of positive profit for C-Money, with full year adjusted EBITDA of $550 million. As of December 31, 2023, our consumer and SME loans principal outstanding was $3.1 billion. a 27% increase year on year. $2.5 billion of that was on the book. Consumer and SME loans active users for the fourth quarter defined as credit users with loans outstanding by the end of the quarter was over $16 million, a 28% increase year on year. In 2024, we will continue to invest in user acquisition for our credit business, both on and off Shopee platform as we see significant upside in our markets. As we scale, we will remain prudent on risk management. In addition to our credit business, Zmoney is also growing our digital banking and insurance services to capture future business opportunities in the digital financial services segment. We expect C-Money to continue its robust growth in 2024. In digital entertainment, Garena has done well in enhancing and optimizing game experiences for its players. For instance, we have continuously introduced fresh and highly localized content to Free Fire. In the fourth quarter, we collaborated with Lamborghini to allow players to drive their cars in-game. We also recently announced our collaboration with JKT48, an idol group from Jakarta, as our Indonesian brand ambassador. These partnerships excite and delight our players and enable us to nurture our local communities. I'm happy to share that we are seeing improved user acquisition and retention trends for Free Fire. In 2023, Free Fire was the most downloaded mobile game globally, according to Sensor Tower. We are pleased that these positive trends are continuing into 2024. In February, Free Fire achieved more than 100 million peak daily active users. it remains one of the largest mobile games in the world. With this positive momentum, we currently expect Free Fire to grow double digits year on year for both user base and bookings in 2024. To conclude, we are pleased to see positive trends in both growth and profitability for all three of our businesses. We will continue to invest for the future with discipline and focus. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank our employees, users, investors, and partners for your continued support throughout this journey. With that, I will invite Tony to discuss our financials.
spk03: Thank you, Forrest, and thanks to everyone for joining the call. We'll see overall total gap revenue increased 5% year on year to $3.6 billion in the fourth quarter and 5% year on year to $13.1 billion for the full year of 2023. This was primarily driven by the improved monetization in our e-commerce and digital financial services businesses. Our total adjusted EBITDA was $127 million in the fourth quarter of 2023, compared to an adjusted EBITDA of $496 million in the fourth quarter of 2022. For the full year of 2023, our total adjusted EBITDA was $1.2 billion, compared to an adjusted EBITDA loss of $878 million for the full year of 2022. On e-commerce, Our fourth quarter GAAP revenue of $2.6 billion included GAAP marketplace revenue of $2.3 billion, up 23% year on year, and GAAP product revenue of $0.3 billion. Within GAAP marketplace revenue, core marketplace revenue, mainly consisting of transaction-based fees and advertising revenues, was $1.6 billion, up 41% year on year. as a result of platform growth and improved monetization. Value-added services revenue, meaning consisting of revenues related to logistics services, was $0.7 billion, down 5% year-on-year as a result of higher revenue netting off against shipping subsidies. For the full year of 2023, GAAP revenue of $9.0 billion included GAAP marketplace revenue of $7.9 billion, up 27% year-on-year, and gap product revenue of $1.1 billion. E-commerce adjusted EBITDA loss was $225 million in the fourth quarter of 2023, compared to an adjusted EBITDA loss of $196 million in the fourth quarter of 2022. 2023 full-year adjusted EBITDA loss improved by 87% year-on-year to $240 million. For our Asian markets, we had an adjusted EBITDA loss of $193 million during the quarter compared to an adjusted EBITDA of $320 million in the fourth quarter of 2022. In our other markets, The adjusted EBITDA loss was $32 million, narrowing meaningfully from last year, when losses were $124 million. Contribution margin loss per order in Brazil improved by nearly 90% year-on-year to reach negative 5 cents. Digital financial services gap revenue was up by 24% year-on-year to $472 million in the fourth quarter, and up by 44% year-on-year to $1.8 billion for the full year of 2023. Adjusted EBITDA was up by 96% year-on-year to $148 million in the fourth quarter of 2023 and up by 341% year-on-year to $550 million for the full year of 2023. Digital entertainment bookings were $456 million in the fourth quarter and $1.8 billion for the full year of 2023. Gap revenue was $511 million in the fourth quarter and $2.2 billion for the full year of 2023. Adjusted EBITDA was $217 million in the fourth quarter and $921 million for the full year of 2023. Returning to our consolidated numbers, we recognized a net non-operating income of $32 million in the fourth quarter of 2023 compared to a net non-operating income of $35 million in the fourth quarter of 2022. For the full year, our non-operating income was $208 million compared to a loss of $13 million for the full year of 2022. The improvement was mainly due to higher interest income for the full year of 2023 as compared to the full year of 2022. We had a net income tax expense of $77 million in the fourth quarter of 2023 compared to net income tax credit of $43 million in the fourth quarter of 2022. For the full year, our net income tax expense was $263 million, compared to $168 million for the full year of 2022. As a result, net loss was $112 million in the fourth quarter of 2023 as compared to net income of $423 million in the fourth quarter of 2022. For the full year, net income was $163 million as compared to a net loss of $1.7 billion for the full year of 2022. At the end of fourth quarter of 2023, cash, cash equivalents, short-term and other treasury investments were $8.5 billion, representing a net increase of $566 million from the previous quarter. The increase includes proceeds of approximately $370 million from lower securities purchased under agreements to resell relating to our banking operations. From the first quarter of 2024 onwards, we will include this as part of our other treasury investments as these are highly liquid marketable securities. With that, let me turn the call to Mingzhu.
spk12: Thank you, Forrest and Tony. We are now ready to open the call to questions. Operator?
spk09: We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time simply press star followed by number one on your telephone keypad if you would like to withdraw your question again press the star one. 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 queue again after the first questions have been addressed at this time we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Your first question comes from the line of Pang Vit from Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.
spk01: Hi, good morning, management team. Thank you very much for the opportunities and congratulations for the solid set of results. Two questions for me. Firstly, on Shopee, can you please provide a little bit more color on the guidance you gave out for 2024? What is the assumption behind in terms of competitive landscape and market share, especially in Indonesia? When it comes to high teen growth, how do you plan to achieve this? And on the margin size, what gave you the confidence that we can go back to break even by second half of this year? And what kind of EBITDA margin we can expect as well for Shopee to achieve in the near term? That's question number one. Question number two related to C-Money. Can you provide some color on why EBITDA was weaker quarter on quarter? We noticed that you spend more on marketing this quarter Should we expect this to be the new run rate? What kind of growth outlook can we expect for 2024? And can we still expect to see EBITDA growth here? Thank you.
spk04: I think, let me address the first question first. I think in terms of the Shopee, we do believe that we are able to grow high things for the full year 2024 as we shared in the opening. For particular for Indonesia, We do see Indonesia is a good market for us in the Q4, and we will believe that the trend likely, the growth trend likely considering Q1 and in line with the other market in the following quarters. If you look at the overall competitive landscape, we have seen a more stable competitive landscape in the past quarters. Again, we cannot sort of control, I guess, our competitors does. But if you look at the past, we have been competing with the similar set of competitors for quite a while. And even with the most intensive competition during the past few quarters, we're able to gain market share while improving our unit economics. We are contributing by a few factors. I think number one is we are a clear market leader. in the market. This translates to the economic scale benefiting by both having better monetization capabilities and also better cost efficiencies. If you look at the scale, we are in a much better position now compared with a year ago. We do believe that we have gained market share in Indonesia if you compare the beginning of the year for last year and now. The second one is I do believe that we have a strong local leadership team and operating team to execute on what we set up to execute and also make the right judgment based on what we see in the market. I spent probably most of my time, if you compare all countries, I spent most time in Indonesia. And many of our management team, including myself, learned to speak Bahasa Indonesia over time as well to understand the market better. Number three is we have built infrastructure for the market over time. For example, our logistics coverage in Indonesia has been a lot larger than before. Our costs have reduced significantly over the past few quarters for shipping one order. Also, the quality has been improved. But most importantly, by having our own logistics in the market, enabling us to offer different services If you follow the market closely, we have recently started the return on the spot for the users, which has very good feedback, not only for Indonesia, but also for Vietnam. We also started a differentiated return services that we're going to allow the user to ask for return anytime during the shipping process. And we can intersect the orders even during the shipping, not offered by any other one in the market so far. And also, on top of that, we have our strong integration with our digital financial services businesses. This not only enables us to reduce the cost for transactions, for example, on the payment side, but also allow us to untap cycle potential by offering the SP later to a broader segment that we have never seen in the market before. All of this helped us not only to reduce costs, but increase the conversions in the market. We've been doing all this in the past few quarters, and we do believe across all dimensions we're able to do better over this year. So that even with whatever competitive landscape that we're facing, we're able to outperform our competitors in the market, be more efficient. in the market. I think that's kind of like how we see the market so far and how this is going to evolve in the future. In terms of the margins, as we shared in the opening, we believe that overall businesses for Shopee were able to break even in the second half of the year, while with the intention to at least maintain our current market share in the market, and this applies to Indonesia as well. I think, as I shared earlier, compared to a year ago, we gained sizable market shares, and we are going to execute even better over this year, given the foundations we've built during the last year. On top of what I mentioned, Just now, in terms of all the things we are doing, there are a couple of other things we are doing further even over the year. One is the price competitiveness. We do believe we are the most price competitive platform in the market, as you can do benchmark externally. We're going to deep dive on that even further over the year, in particular, not only for Indonesia, but for the other markets as well. But yeah, Indonesia is the key market for us. They were also going to further drive the service quality that I shared earlier, not only on the logistics, but also on the after-fulfillment, like the return of phone services, the customer service quality, et cetera. And all this will essentially put us into an even better position. um in in the future um not only sort of maintaining our growth trajectories but also improving our impetus um for the um uh live stream that we talked about in the past uh earning call um the web thing uh uh quite uh uh fast growth on the live stream in this quarter as well um as we share in the opening we have Across the region, we have about 15% of our orders come from Livestream. For Indonesia, it's even bigger percentage. Indonesia is the first country we started. In some market, we believe that we are probably the largest Livestream platform in the market. Not only the scales, but while we're growing it, we have reducing the been reducing the economics quite significantly in the past few months and continue in Q1, essentially. This also enables us to compete effectively with our competitors. And we should say just from something a year ago, you know, if you look at it, if you look at a year ago, we probably don't have this ecosystem. We have to invest to build this ecosystem that we are now in a very different status for that. I think this sort of probably conclude on the first question for Shopee. Moving to the second question on the C-Money EBITDA for Q4. So I think we probably should put into perspective on the overall C-Money businesses. The C-Money has seen the first positive profit in 2023, and the trajectory has been doing well if you look at Q1, Q2, Q3, and extend to Q4. we have seen very healthy margin in our C-Money businesses. And given the very healthy margin in the businesses, we in Q4, leveraging on the facilities we spent, we invest more to acquire new users to the platform. And this essentially will bring us a better possibility in long term. use acquisition costs very prudently. Every user required will bring positive profit over the time. Thank you.
spk09: Your next question comes from the line of Navin Kela from UBS. Your line is open.
spk07: Hi, thank you for the opportunity. I actually had a couple of questions. First, I just wanted to understand a little bit about competition in the e-commerce space, particularly in Indonesia, I suppose Q4 numbers might have benefited from the fact that TikTok was not in the market for a large part of the quarter. So since the relaunch of TikTok and, you know, as we probably come close to the end of the trial period, have you seen the intensity from the combined TikTok, Tokopedia entity evolve in a different direction over the course of the quarter? So that's my question number one. And second question, I guess, given the strong cash balance and your expectation of, I guess, positive profit for the full year for the group, how do we think about use and allocation of this cash going forward potentially for buybacks and other use cases? Thank you.
spk04: For the first question, I think I shared quite a bit in the last answer as well. um generally we compete with both competitors you mentioned for quite a long period of time um and um you're right that um it does benefit us um in some extent in q4 that tick tock wasn't operating for the period of time for for fight for period of time during the quarter uh but i don't think that's the only reason that would grow well in q4 uh we're seeing similar growth trends Continued in q1 as well even you know the landscape have changed In a typical e-commerce Transactions as we can see across globally It might not necessarily one plus one plus two greater than two situations I think for us the most important thing is to focus on what we are great at as I mentioned earlier our scale advantage, our local leadership and operating teams, our infrastructure build over time, our integration with DFS, and all of this give us the competitive advantage in the past few quarters, as you can see, and will continue to give us the advantage in the coming quarters. And with that, I think that, you know, we have share that we're expecting a good growth for Shopee over this coming year in 2024 and in the coming quarters.
spk10: And regarding our cash balance, we think for a company of our size, it's prudent to maintain a strong cash balance. And we're also very disciplined and focused in deploying our capital to capture future opportunities to maximize our long-term shareholder return. We do not rule out any options for using our cash balance in this regard.
spk09: Your next question comes from the line of Alicia from Citigroup. Your line is open.
spk08: Hi. Good evening, management. Thanks for taking my questions. Congrats on the solid results. I have two questions. Obviously, with the Ramadan coming, do you anticipate your competitors in Indonesia to further step up the spending? And in the event, if your competitor in Indonesia are catching up on the market share, would you step up your spending that might actually prevent your EBITDA to regain profitability in the second half of this year? Second question is, what are the main reasons for your confidence in growing the free fire in double digit in booking and user this year. What have you done or plan to do to regain your user attractions and monetization? Thank you.
spk04: For the first question, so in a way, Ramadan can be a startup already in Indonesia. We are comfortable with web things so far, let's put it this way. In a way, we cannot see market share as a static number. Market share is always dynamic. The most important thing for us is to make sure that we always have a sizable leadership compared to our next competitors so that we can sustain our scale advantage. That's number one. Number two is we're able to build up our long-term mode. competitive competitors who are more efficient when we compete with the competitor in the market. I think, again, as I shared earlier, given all the things we have done, even with the most intensive competition in the past few quarters, we're able to reduce our cost while increasing our market shares. I think this reflects of the mode we have been over time, and we do believe that we'll be able to continue in the future.
spk10: And regarding Free Fire, as we shared earlier, we're encouraged by the positive trends we have seen so far this year in terms of active user base and monetization across our various markets. As a result, we share that our current expectation is for the game to achieve double-digit year-on-year growth for both user base and bookings. As a self-developed game, Free Fire also enjoys better margin for us. In terms of what we have done and will do in the future, I think our focus has been quite consistent. It's on building better user experience, such as easy access to a user's file download size and data requirements, introducing more engaging content, and strengthen eSports communities to further develop the game into a strong evergreen franchise.
spk09: Your next question comes from a line up. Here's Chowdhury from HSBC. Your line is open.
spk05: Yeah, hi. Congratulations to the management team on a great set of results. First question is on Shopee. If I analyze your fourth quarter GMV, that itself is implying around 18% year-on-year growth in 2024 GMV. Why does company expect to grow only high teens range and not more than that? What is driving conservative guidance? And also for Shopee EBITDA, as you expect to turn profitable in second half, would it mean that on a full year basis adjusted losses for Shopee would narrow year on year in 24? Secondly, on gaming, what led to fourth quarter quarterly pay users decline despite of strong seasonality? and your outlook for free fire is strong, would that mean Consol Garena will also grow double digit and what's the margin outlook for Garena business? Thank you.
spk04: I think in terms of the guidance we give out, I think the height change for the year, we believe that is a reasonable estimate of giving out based on both the market growth rate and also the EBITDA goal we set up to achieve. And on top of that, the most important thing is with this, we're able to sustain our market leadership while building up all the competitive modes that we've been building over the past years. On top of that, even start a few other new initiatives during the year. So we are comfortable with what it is. In a way, we are not chasing for growth for the growth. We are trying to grow in an efficient and prudent fashion with the long-term probability in mind. In terms of the second question, whether the four-year will narrow over time, I think this is something we haven't giving a guidance on. We probably wouldn't comment too detail on that, but generally I think what we set to achieve again is to have Shopee as the overall business even over the second half of the year.
spk10: Regarding Free Fire, I think that quote on quote user fluctuation can be many reasons, including seasonality and game launch for Garena as a whole or esports events. But for Free Fire overall, I think we have, as shared earlier, we are very positive based on the trends we have seen so far. And therefore, we want to give market some indication of what we also have seen. Regarding the rest of our portfolio, which are third-party games published by us, we will continue also to work closely with our partners to bring more content to our game communities as well.
spk09: Your next question comes from the line of Thomas Chong from Jefferies. Your line is open.
spk14: Hi, good evening. Thanks, management, for taking my questions and congratulations on a strong set of results. My question is first on Shopee. Given we are looking for just a little bit to break even in the second half and we have built up our competitive mode, I just want to ask about in terms of the tech rate trend for Shopee in 2024, how should we think about the advertising and the commission trend? That's number one. And then number two, on the fintech side, given the strong growth momentum that we are seeing, I just want to get some color with respect to our user acquisition strategies What kind of channel are we getting new users other than the organic one? And on that one, how are we thinking about the long-performing loans expectations as a percentage of our loan book? How is our technology or our data insights which can make it at a low level? Thank you.
spk04: On the first question, regarding the tick rate trend, As Jeff was saying that we have adjusted our commission side continuously over the past few quarters. We are actually reviewing every month in terms of what makes sense for our user base in terms of commissions. I think overall the most important thing is we want to make sure there's a healthy ecosystem that our seller has a reasonable margin to operate. but also are able to support the overall marketplace to grow healthily. So we will probably see some adjustment on the commissions over the year. Some of them can be for specific categories, some of them for specific countries. Yeah, I think it's probably going to be a fine-tuning, I guess, over the year. On the second part, on the active rate, We do believe there is a sizable potential on the ad side for the take rate. Compared to many global peers, we still have a sizable room to grow there, and we have done quite few technical revamps in the past few months, and this will be deployed and fine-tuned in the coming quarter, which will enable us to further grow our ad take rate. The second question regarding the C-Money growth, if you look at the C-Money, the majority of business are in the credit business at this point in time. Of course, we also have digital banks and insurance, but still in the relatively growing stage. There are a few passes we're looking at here. One is to further penetrate our Shopee ecosystem through our Shopee Pay Later. The penetration, our e-commerce platform still has a room to grow. We started in Indonesia first and other countries later. Even for our earliest market, we still see a potential to further penetrate the user base. I think that's the first one. Second one is we also believe that outside of the Shopee ecosystem, there are many users that we can onboard to our digital finance platforms. This is still in a very early stage as we started much later than penetrating the Shopee ecosystem. But essentially, I think you can imagine that in a big country like Indonesia where credit card penetration are relatively small, single digit stage, we are probably the first one that are able to offer a credit service to the broader mass market. And of course, this helped by the Shopify penetration in the mass market. But there are still many other users out of the Shopify ecosystem in the mass market that we believe that we can target on. And of course, there are many channels to do that. We have offline QIS payment. We have very product-based, theme-based, consumption loans that we are working on, which is not uncommon in many other markets. So that's another part of the equations in the credit businesses. The third equation in the credit businesses is to cross-sell other financial products to our Shopee Pay Later user base. I think you asked about NPL as well. The great thing for our businesses here is that giving the data we have from the e-commerce transactions and also over years we build up the external data besides our ecosystem that we are able to credit rate user a lot more efficiently and effectively. If the user onboarded to our Shopee Pay Later platform, we have even better credit data based on the Shopee Pay Later performance. This will enable us to sell them many other credit products over time. For example, we mentioned earlier on the cash loan that we offer to the users, which unlock more use case. Basically, the user can use the credit for many other use cases besides the Shopee scenarios. and other products we are rolling out over time. And I think as we grow, the scale will also enable us to lower down the cost of service as well, so the economics can be even better. As time goes, this will go to a positive cycle that we have a better cost of service, better risk management so that we are able to target even broader segments in the market so we can grow even further in the market. I think that's probably how we look at the growth side of the story. On the NPL side, we're seeing a relatively stable NPL, as Tony has shared in the opening, over the time. Of course, that's based on the number one, the data we have, as I mentioned in the first, in the previous descriptions. But also, because I do believe that we have probably the best, if not one of the best credit modeling team in South Asia. to utilize the data to be able to credit rate our users. On top of that, it's also about how we manage the business overall. We manage the business in a very prudent way. We're not rushing for growth, further growth. We want to to make sure that our financial services not only have a problem now, but have a problem in the very long term, even in the credit cycle situation. So putting all these things together, we will probably see a pretty good upside for our financial services. And 2024, we would like to further grow our user base and maintain our credit risk in the market. Thank you.
spk09: Your next question comes from the line of Sachin Sangankar from Bank of America. Your line is open.
spk00: Hi, thank you for the opportunity. I have two questions. First question, if we could help get a bit more clarity on improving unit economics at live streaming, can you give some color in terms of the difference between normal e-commerce and live streaming in terms of AOV, the margin perspective, and also any thoughts on steady state EBITDA margin at live streaming? Second question, also wanted to understand a bit more on Free Fire. i.e. is the expected launch of India baked in the expectation of a double-digit growth? And are there any specific markets which is driving your optimism in terms of overall growth? Thank you.
spk04: In terms of unique norming for live stream, it has improved cyclically in the past few months. Of course, at this point in time, comparing to the non-live stream part, It has a lower eugenomics simply because we just started and it takes some effort to invest for the growth. But we do believe in the long term, the live stream probability wouldn't be too different, would be quite similar to what we see in the other part of the marketplace platform. In terms of the AOV that you asked earlier, we started with a low AOV compared to the marketplace. As time goes, it will start to converge. And now in some market, it's very similar. Some market even a little bit higher. Some market a bit lower. So it's a bit mixed at this stage. But eventually, in the big market, it will converge as time goes. In the smaller market, it might have different variations. But I don't think it's significant for the purpose of discussion here.
spk10: And regarding free fire, So far, the positive trends we have seen across various different markets for our global operations, and currently no material development in India. We are still making changes to the Free Fire in India to best accommodate our users' preference locally, and we'll update the market when there's more material development.
spk09: Our next question comes from a line of Jiang Xiao from Berkeley. Your line is open.
spk02: Thank you very much for taking my questions. My first question is about your growth trend in the near term. You have returned back to growth over 20% for the first time in the last year and a half. You changed your strategy a couple of times during that period. usually this kind of momentum doesn't sort of change very quickly. So based on what you are seeing and also given what you have said so far about Indonesia, could you talk about your near-term growth momentum right now in the first quarter? Should we expect sort of similar to what you saw in Q4? My second question is about your sort of the mix between core marketplace and the VAS. I know you talked about the VAS, which is the logistics sort of decline. Your VAS was at least partially, if not mostly, due to the subsidies for shipping. But over the last few quarters, it looks like your core marketplace growth has been very, very good, right? It's 30%, 40%. And your VAS growth has been – relatively low, very low, and negative in Q4. Other than the subsidies, are there other reasons behind or strategic reasons behind these pretty meaningful differences? And if you add subsidies back, what is the VAS growth being somewhat similar to your core marketplace growth? Thank you.
spk04: I think for the growth trend for the near terms, I think we have seen pretty good growth in Q1. You probably can see from the external data as well, although it's not very accurate. But bear in mind that Q1, there's a Ramadan season for Indonesia in particular, and we have Chan New Year in some other markets. So we have to stick into But all in all, we're pretty happy with what we see in Q1 so far.
spk10: On the VAS versus core marketplace, I would encourage you to look at core marketplace more closely to measure our overall platform growth as well as monetization. The reason for VAS top line growth To deviate from that is because of accounting treatment that has a counter revenue effect caused by shipping subsidies. So that actually does not only affect the bottom line, but also affect the top line for that revenue segment, causing a departure in overall trend. But we cannot discuss the non-GAAP revenue, adjusted revenue, But if you add that back, I think the overall growth is consistent with the platform growth.
spk09: Your next question comes from a line of Ranjam Sharma from JP Morgan, Singapore. Your line is open.
spk06: Hi, good morning, and thank you for the presentation. Two questions from my side. Firstly, for Chris on live streaming, is there any cohort analysis that the team has done on the impact of live streaming GMV as incentives are removed for buyers. And the second question is for Forrest, if he's there. On Garena, still the discussion is around free fire, but are there any developments to move away from a single title franchise to a more broader studio? Thank you.
spk04: For the live streams on the cohort, yes, we do do. I look at the cohort for Livestream and we're seeing pretty good retention and repurchase rate for Livestream. But on top of that, I think more importantly for us actually for Livestream is we're seeing very good news percentage coming to Livestream, which means that it does help us to reach out to segment that we might not completely reach out to before, which help us to grow the marketplace further as time goes. And we also observed that the news are coming to Livestream also cross-purchase from long Livestream platform as well. I think these are the encouraging signs we see, and that's also how actually we have been reducing our, improving our economics in the past few months.
spk10: Regarding Garena, I think Garena is definitely not a single franchise platform. We have multiple titles, both self-developed and published across different genres, including Battle Royale, MOBA, sports. casual, RPG, etc. It's just that the super successful Free Fire franchise seems to dwarf in comparison the other titles, which are also highly successful and very long-lasting for Garena so far, thanks to our global team's very strong operations and ability to build a strong pipeline in content, in partnership with our partners, as well as self-development. and also in growing our global esports communities. I think that being said, as always, we're very focused on building future pipelines in terms of expanding our portfolio of genres and type of content, including more user-generated content, deploy more AI tools in building and furthering new models of interaction with our users, All of these things are going on in the background that our teams have been very, very much focused on. So we are very excited about the long-term prospects of Garena, again, as a leading global game company.
spk09: Your final question comes from the line of Ellie Zhang from Macquarie. Your line is open.
spk11: Great. Thank you so much for taking my question. I just have kind of two questions on the e-commerce side. Just now, management, you talked about our price competitiveness. Just wondering how do we maintain this level of supply chain sustainability and how do we see our merchants general overlap compared to the other e-commerce apps in Indonesia? Also, in the slightly longer term, what is the end game for, I guess, overall e-commerce dynamics, and how do we really evaluate longer-term profitability level on the EBITDA side? Thank you.
spk04: Yeah. I think for the price competitiveness, I think the platform, we are generally most competitive in the market, as you can benchmark from external numbers. The key to sustain price competitiveness are from few angles. Number one is we have the scale. So scale does bring advantage. So assuming that the same seller sell 100 items on our platform, sell 10 on other platforms, clearly we have a slightly better bargain power in terms of how much price that can be set. I think that's number one. Number two is the cost to serve from a seller perspective. We would like to make the process for a seller to transact to make their businesses successful on our platform much simpler compared to the other platforms that come with the tools, policies, and the fundamental concept of how the marketplace operates. I think the third one is to be able to identify the right skills, right sellers through our traffic allocation algorithms and policies, of course. It's about how can we make sure the sellers with the good performance and with the good price competitiveness will be presented, will be rewarded with the better traffic on our platform. So they can sell more, so they can reduce the price further because the scale they achieved. And they can also reduce the operation cost to serve the customers. And then this will flow to a very positive direction and the win-win for everybody from the both buyer and seller perspective. I think that's probably on the price competitive side. Just to add to that, I think another part of price competitiveness is to be able to offer different services to different type of selling in the platform. There are sellers who operate a full value chain. There are sellers who are very specialized in part value chain, for example, on the production side or the importing side. It's very important for us as a marketplace platform to serve them well, to enable them to sell well our platform. so we can leverage on their strengths rather than sort of, you know, they need to be better at everything and it makes it a bit harder for many of the sellers to excel in the platform. But, you know, again, these are a lot of detailed operation methods that we have to work on to make sure that this works out smoothly. I think in terms of the long-term probability, my feeling is that our market is not too different from the other major e-commerce platform that you have seen before. I think similar property level that is reasonable. In some market, maybe a bit better because our market position, because the nature of the retail margin in the market. Some market might be a bit more competitive, but in general, we don't see our market too different compared to the other market and the market leader. As a market leader in the platform, we will be able to achieve similar possibilities as a market leader in the other market.
spk09: This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Ms. Minju Song for any closing remarks.
spk12: Thank you all for joining today's call. We look forward to speaking to all of you again next quarter. Thank you.
spk09: The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect. Thank you. The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending
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