HIGHLIGHTS: Forrest Li - CEO of Sea

**Nicolai Tangen** (0:01)
Hi everybody, tune in to this short version of the podcast, which we do every Friday for the long version. Tune in on Wednesdays.
Hi everybody, I'm Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Southern Wealth Fund, and today we are in really, really good company. We are in Singapore. We're talking to Forrest Li, the founder and the CEO of CEE, which is the largest tech company in Southeast Asia, a market leader in video game distribution and in FinTech and in e-commerce. An incredible journey and a big thank you for taking the time.

**Forrest Li** (0:32)
Welcome to Singapore, Nicolai. Thank you for visiting us.

**Nicolai Tangen** (0:35)
I also should say that in the fund, we are a big shareholder in CEE, and so we follow it very, very closely. But first of all, for those in Europe and the US who don't know CEE, what do you do?

**Forrest Li** (0:49)
Yeah, CEE is a Singaporean technology company, and with the mission to better the lives of consumers and small businesses through technology. So we are a technology company by heart. It has been 16 years when we started company, and we primarily focus on Southeast Asia market as the first market, and later on we also enter into some new market like Taiwan, like Brazil. Actually, interestingly, the name, we chose the name C as our company name, it's actually a short form of Southeast Asia. This is a kind of a shout out of our home market. We feel very proud of that.
And today we primarily operate three businesses, video game business named Garena, and an e-commerce business named Shopee, and more recently the fintech business named Money. And for Garena, it started as just a game distributor in Southeast Asia. But later on, we were hoping to become one of the largest mobile game developers and publishers in the world, and self-developed a game from Garena named Free Fire.

**Nicolai Tangen** (2:00)
And you have something like 100 million people playing this every day, right?

**Forrest Li** (2:04)
Yeah, Free Fire, like today, is the D-largest mobile game in the world by daily active users. As you mentioned, more than 100 million people play the game from over 130 countries every day on a daily basis.

**Nicolai Tangen** (2:16)
Do you play it?

**Forrest Li** (2:17)
Yeah, I play it a lot.

**Nicolai Tangen** (2:21)
But you were a video game distributor. How did you come up with the idea of going into e-commerce? Just what was the thinking behind that?

**Forrest Li** (2:29)
Yeah, it's down to what is the fundamental value and the technology can bring. And I remember, interestingly, actually 10 years ago, I sometimes brought my family to China for holidays. And at that time, I had a six-year-old daughter.
So we are very, very impressed by how much e-commerce has developed, especially the mobile e-commerce that developed in China. So on our trip, and sometimes my daughter wants this, wants that, like no matter what, she wants it. And these are just a few types and the swaps on her mom's phone. And the box just delivered to the door the next day. And whatever he wants, he says she wants, it will be in the box. To her, this is a magic.
And I give a lot of thoughts about it. And when we came back to Singapore, and I think this is just a great business. And it's created so much value and created so much joy and convenience to consumers. And it's hard for me to swallow the fact such business, such thing doesn't exist in Southeast Asia.

**Nicolai Tangen** (3:39)
What do you think is going to be the future development in this business? What are the next developments?

**Forrest Li** (3:44)
I think fundamentally, the core of the e-commerce is like how do you make sure it's number one is more affordable and more accessible to more people, to have more people to enjoy the benefit of the e-commerce. And this is really to a lot of work in the supply chain like optimizations. At this moment, if we are not just matching whatever the merchandise with the customers, we also put a lot of effort to work with a lot of upstream suppliers and how to make their product more attractive, more competitive. We provide a lot of them the market information, what really customers want and to help them to do better businesses.
And again, so delivery is a big thing. It's a very, very important part in the whole e-commerce experience. And there's still a lot of more we can do. And you can be always make it cheaper and faster.

**Nicolai Tangen** (4:41)
The third area you have is FinTech. What do you tell us? What are you doing there?