Visualizing Sea’s rapid rise

If you had invested US$1000 in Sea during its initial public offering in 2017, when its shares were priced at US$15 each, your investment would be worth at least US$14,446 today.

In the 12 years since its founding, Sea Group has risen to become one of Southeast Asia’s most valuable tech companies.

From its humble origins as a multiplayer gaming platform Garena in 2009, Sea has grown into a prominent internet company encompassing ecommerce, digital payments; a “peranakan” Tencent and Alibaba.

Sea’s share price has grown unbridled in the past year – peaking at US$280 in February – amidst an exuberance in the tech sector. Its market capitalization, as of May 17, was US$112.6 billion.

See also: Visualizing the sheer size of Sea Group

Forrest Li, Sea’s founder and group CEO, was an avid gamer himself. In 2009, Li founded Garena as a PC games publisher and social gaming platform, before moving into mobile game development.

Not all of Sea’s ventures, however, have been successful. BeeTalk, a messaging app that was a cross between WhatsApp, Facebook, and Tinder, failed to take off despite some early traction in Thailand and Taiwan.

The interactive timeline below tracks Sea’s journey through the years through our lens – from its early days as Garena and when it first breached US$1 billion to become a unicorn in 2014, to Shopee’s early efforts.

We’ll see that the seeds of Sea’s recent foray into food delivery with ShopeeFood were planted as early as in 2014, with early investments into grocery delivery platforms Redmart and a year later, in Foody.vn.

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