(Oct 20): Singapore internet giant Sea Ltd is starting a new cloud business and weighing a public listing of its financial technology (fintech) arm, seeking to bolster growth and revive a plunging stock.

The company plans to offer cloud services to businesses around the world, under a new arm called Sea Cloud, chief executive officer Forrest Li wrote in a memo to staff seen by Bloomberg News.

That shift — which would mean competing directly with the likes of Amazon Web Services and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s cloud operations — comes as the company is also considering spinning out and listing its financial services arm Monee, according to the memo.

“Monee is approaching the point where it can stand on its own two feet and begin its own race. Going public could give it the resources and the room to go further and faster than it can today,” Li wrote, commemorating the ninth anniversary of Sea’s stock-market debut. 

The e-commerce and entertainment group is locked in a fierce battle against deep-pocketed challengers including ByteDance Ltd’s TikTok Shop and Alibaba’s Lazada. That’s as Shein and PDD Holdings Inc’s Temu are also looking to break into Southeast Asia, an emerging region of 675 million people where more shoppers are coming online. The competitive landscape is weighing on Sea’s shares, which are down more than 30% this year.

A new battleground for Sea’s next stage of growth is also forming an ocean away from its home turf — in Brazil — as the Singaporean company looks to expand its Shopee online empire. 

Li, who is fond of penning memos to Sea’s 80,000-plus employees, last year pledged to double down on artificial intelligence (AI), betting that this would help the company hit a trillion-dollar market capitalisation. So far, Sea has integrated AI into its daily operations, launched new AI applications and partnered with frontier labs like OpenAI in e-commerce.

The company spent two years rebuilding its in-house cloud platform to host a wave of AI applications that it can offer to other enterprises, Li said.

“When we built Shopee at the start of the mobile internet era, we made it mobile-first while much of our competition was still thinking in terms of websites,” said Li. “We believe AI is that moment again.” 

Uploaded by Tham Yek Lee