It’s official: Sea files for IPO on NYSE

Nick Nash, group president of Garena at Tech in Asia Tokyo Conference 2016.

Singapore unicorn Sea, formerly Garena, announced on Friday that it has filed a registration statement for a proposed IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Credit Suisse will be the bookrunners for the IPO. The number of shares and their price range have not yet been determined, says the announcement.

Sea, which made its mark initially with gaming, diversified into ecommerce and digital payments. Today it has three brands – Garena, Shopee, and AirPay – with a presence in seven markets across Southeast Asia: Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Singapore.

It rebranded itself Sea from Garena on its eighth birthday on May 8 this year, after a funding round of US$550 million from Hillhouse, Cathay Financial, Farallon, GDP Ventures, JG Summit Holdings, and other investors.

See: Q&A: How Sea wants to unite Southeast Asia against the giants

GDP Ventures is run by Martin Hartono, son of Indonesia’s wealthiest family that controls cigarette-maker Djarum. JG Summit is founded by Philippine billionaire John Gokongwei.

Sea’s earlier backers were China’s Tencent, Malaysia’s state investment arm Khazanah Nasional Bhd, Singapore’s Temasek subsidiary SeaTown Holdings International, Japan’s Mistletoe fund of Taizo Son (the younger brother of SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son), Canada’s Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, and US private equity firm General Atlantic LLC. The IPO is great news for all of them as large exits from Asia are rare.

The US$550-million funding this year was aimed at expanding Shopee in Indonesia, where it competes with Lazada and Tokopedia which are both backed by Chinese giant Alibaba. It also prepared Sea for the IPO, which could raise upwards of US$1 billion.

The company was valued at US$3.75 billion at its earlier funding round in March 2016. The valuation for the latest round was not disclosed.

Garena introduced the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game League of Legends (LoL) to Southeast Asia. Today LoL is the most popular MOBA in the world, with 100 million unique visitors a month.

Sea’s diversification with Shopee and AirPay made it a broadbased player targeting the digital market across Southeast Asia, with a population of nearly 600 million people and US$3.0 trillion in GDP in 2016.