In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen - HIGHLIGHTS: Forrest Li - CEO of Sea

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

We've curated a special 10-minute version of the podcast for those in a hurry.   Here you can listen to the full episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/no/podcast/sea-ceo-gaming-empire-southeast-asia-strategy-and/id1614211565?i=1000731902134&l=nbWhat does it take to build Southeast Asia's largest tech company from scratch? Forrest Li, founder and CEO of Sea, joins Nicolai Tangen to discuss the journey of building a $100 billion technology empire. They talk about Sea's journey from video game distributor to e-commerce leader, the success of the game Free Fire with over 100 million daily players, and expanding into fintech services. Forrest shares his humble leadership approach inspired by the movie Forrest Gump and explains how solving local challenges like complex delivery routes helped Sea beat major competitors. Sea now operates across gaming, e-commerce, and financial services in multiple countries. Tune in!In Good Company is hosted by Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management. New full episodes every Wednesday, and don't miss our Highlight episodes every Friday.  The production team for this episode includes Isabelle Karlsson and PLAN-B's Niklas Figenschau Johansen, Sebastian Langvik-Hansen and Pål Huuse. Background research was conducted by Oscar Hjelde. Watch the episode on YouTube: Norges Bank Investment Management - YouTubeWant to learn more about the fund? The fund | Norges Bank Investment Management (nbim.no)Follow Nicolai Tangen on LinkedIn: Nicolai Tangen | LinkedInFollow NBIM on LinkedIn: Norges Bank Investment Management: Administrator for bedriftsside | LinkedInFollow NBIM on Instagram: Explore Norges Bank Investment Management on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Nicola Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian So on Wealth Fund, and today we are in really, really good company. We are in Singapore. We're talking to Forrest Lee, the founder and the CEO of C, 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. Welcome to Singapore, Nicola. Thank you for visiting us.

I also should say that in the fund, we are a big shareholder in Sea, and so we follow it very, very closely. But first of all, for those in Europe and the US who don't know C, what do you do? Yeah, C 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. And it has been 16 years when we started the company. And we probably focus on Southeast Asia market as the first market. And later we also enter into some new market like Taiwan, like Brazil. Actually, interestingly, the name of the, we chosen the name C as our company name is 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 Shoppy.

And more recently, the fintech business named the money. And for Garena, it started as just a game distributor in Southeast Asia. But later on, we've been to become one of the largest mobile game developer and publisher in the world. And a self-developed game from Guerrina named Free Fire. And you have something like 100 million people playing this every day, right? Yeah, Free Fire, like today is the de-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 on a daily basis. Do you play it?

Yeah, I played a lot. 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? Yeah, it's down to what is the fundamental value and the technology can bring. And I remember, interestingly, actually 10 years ago, and sometimes I brought my family to China for holidays. And at that time, I have a six-year-old daughter. It's like a, yeah.

So we are very, very impressed by how much, like, e-commerce has developed, especially, like, the mobile e-commerce developed in China. So on our trip, and sometimes my daughter want this, want that, like no matter what, she wanted, and it's just a few kind of taps and the swaps on her mom's phone, and the box just delivered to the door next day, and whatever he wants, he said she wants, it would be in the box. To her, this is a magic. And I give a lot of thoughts about it, like when we came back to Singapore, and I think this is just a great business, and it's a create so much. value and create 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. What do you think is going to be the future development in this business? What are the next developments? I think fundamentally the core of the e-commerce is like how do you make sure it's the number one is more affordable and more accessible to more people, to have more people to enjoy in the benefit of the e-commerce. And this is related 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 always make it cheaper and faster. The third area you have is fintech.

What are you, tell us, what are you doing there? Oh, this is amazing and it's a very, very exciting business. And we think we have a full potential there. And I mean, we start this business. actually by resolving a lot of issues we have, the challenge we have for our video game business and for our e-commerce businesses, right? And in the early days,

even we published the games and we have best games from all over the world. But because of the people, no credit card, and for the gamers, they have no way to pay us. And we have to build up a cash card, like a gift card network ourselves as a game company. It's a built up a payment network. And I remember the days I drive my car with all the bags of credit card to go around 7-Eleven to distribute and to account how many cars I have in the stock and how much money I receive.

And later on, for e-commerce, online transaction is become a big challenge as well. And there's so many transactions and how you want to make sure the transaction is all smooth in such a large scale and in a very, very safe way. So that's all the challenge we started with. So that's, we build a lot of solution and product under the money or fintech business umbrella to solve these issues. But actually we see increasingly, we see a very, very big opportunity is because of our e-commerce businesses. We realize, and when people want to buy things, and they really don't have much access to the

consumption credit, and such an issue has been largely resolved in most of the market, Western market, by credit card. But as you know, the credit card penetration is relatively low in most of the market we operated in. So people just do not have access to credit. And that's why we introduced like through our shoppy purchase and we introduce the, it's a credit line for them. Like they can just buy things now, but pay it later. So in some other Western market, this is just a supplementary to the credit card. But here it's become a major main solution.

So even within a very short period of time, money is already the largest digital lender for the consumer consumption in Southeast Asia. We already have over $7 billion loan book, and it's growing very, very rapidly. Moving on to corporate culture, how would you define the corporate culture in C? We have five core values. When you work into the office, you may see the value work. So we have that war in every single office. We want to make sure it's very, very visible.

It's a reminder to all the employees on a daily basis. The five things is we serve. We always want to make sure customer come first, whatever we do is we need. We have the customer service mentality and we run. We highly value execution. Speed matters. And if we get things down today,

we're not going to wait till tomorrow. And if we can run, we will not walk. And we adapt. And we know we are in a very, very dynamic environment and it's highly competitive and the technology change so fast. As you just mentioned, the share price can go five times and can go, go down like a 70, 80%, 90%. So it's a very, very changing environment. So we need to make sure we can always adapt. And we commit.

So like whatever you want to achieve, right, it doesn't matter. It's a hundred billion dollar market cap or trillion billion billion dollars. Whatever things you do and you want to be committed. That is the only way you can achieve excellence. And actually, the last one is we stay humble. And I believe this is the foundation of our core values, the culture. And if you have to pick one word to describe our corporate culture, and that will be humility. I think it's a guide us in the good time.

Why is it important to be humble? Well, I mean, I think it's interesting. And that is even before I started the company. And I was a Stanford student. And I was fortunately enough to see in the audience when Steve Jobs gave this a very famous commencement speech, and stay foolish and stay hungry. And he shared three amazing personal stories.

But my takeaway from that story, all this speech, actually is advice to the young fresh graduate. And it's a calling for humility, right? Because you have to be humble. I have to stay humble to stay foolish, right? And you have to acknowledge, okay, you are probably not the smartest ones and there are a lot of things can be done better. You should keep learning.

And you have to be humble to stay hungry, right? And to try to achieve more, it's not enough. And there's more things we can do. And that's a keep, it's a very, very good reminder to me as a person. And also it's how I want to run my company. So this is a, it's very, very important. I think to keep driving the company, keep moving forward.