Q&A: Sea president on the unicorn’s strategies to become a $100b company and fight giants

Nick Nash, group president of Sea, at Tech in Asia Singapore 2017.

Sea, which filed for an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange, is one of Southeast Asia’s most valuable tech companies. It was valued at US$3.75 billion last year and raised another round of US$550 million this year at an undisclosed valuation.

Sea is an acronym for Southeast Asia. It has three big brands under the Sea umbrella: Garena, which owns one of the largest digital content platforms in Southeast Asia, largely around games; ecommerce business Shopee; and fintech company AirPay.

We think much more about where the open oceans are, as opposed to where it’s easy.

“What fundamentally matters for any organization – for profit or non-profit – is, are you doing something useful for people? And we want to be remembered as a company that really served their customers and did so in a really humble, authentic, local way,” Nick Nash, group president at Sea, told Tech in Asia a few months ago. “That’s why we wake up every day and we go to work.”

Nash spoke at length about Sea’s growth philosophy and expansion strategies during the Tech in Asia Singapore 2017 conference on May 18. Here’s an edited excerpt of the interview:

Can you give us some insight into how you assess markets? For instance, let’s say a market doesn’t have a very high level of financial inclusion. Is that a red flag for you or is that a sign: “this is the opportunity we got to go after.” How do you assess a market’s readiness for either services?

A Temasek survey done a few months ago said Vietnam is a country where 71 percent of adults above age 25 don’t have a bank account. We look at that and we see opportunity because someone can now only sell a product through an app store with a credit card.

What we have decided to do is to think about where their real disposable income is, regardless of whether people have bank accounts or not. If the demand for services is there, if the population is there, we will find a way to reach those users.

A perfect example is, again, Vietnam. The country would be a tremendous source of anxiety for folks with the Western perspective that are relying on the traditional 16-digit credit card number and 3-digit CVV on the back to do authentication.

What we’ve set up instead was about 40,000 to 50,000 little mom-and-pop location stores within stores, where regular folks can pay cash into a wallet, and that wallet effectively becomes a prepaid debit account which they can use to pay for all sorts of things. The total cost in that is a little bit higher than a credit card payment system, but it is totally worth it in the long-term, in terms of being able to serve that consumer base.

So we think much more about where the open oceans are, as opposed to where it’s easy.

When we are talking about the expansion, you make it seem easy. I understand you have a team of about 5,000. How do you keep everyone moving in the right direction?

There is no perfect solution, but a couple of things are absolute essentials.