What happened
Shares of Sea Limited (SE +13.27%) went up as much as 11.9% this week, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence. The international gaming, e-commerce, and payments company is bringing world-famous musical artist Justin Beiber to its hit game, Free Fire.
In addition, there was a report that its e-commerce platform Shoppee opened five new distribution centers in Brazil. As of this writing, shares of Sea Limited are up 10.8% this week.
So what
Sea Limited didn't have any huge announcements this week, but there were some solid green shoots for its different operating segments. First, Justin Bieber announced he'll be performing a concert and debuting a new song on Free Fire, Sea's hit video game.
Given the popularity of the artist, this could be a great marketing play for the game and get more users to engage with the service. This is important, as Free Fire's users declined from 649 million to 616 million over the 12 months ending March 31. A Beiber concert could mitigate these losses.
Second, a report came out of South America that Shoppee has invested in five new distribution centers to help improve its e-commerce services. This division has been growing like gangbusters for Sea Limited (64% revenue growth last quarter) and is one of the top e-commerce apps in Brazil. It's likely that investors took this news positively.
Lastly, this 10%-plus move might just be chalked up to broad market movements, with the Nasdaq 100 Index climbing almost 4% in the last five days. If this reverses with more downside volatility, Sea Limited shares may sell off again.
NYSE: SE
Key Data Points
Now what
After this-week's gains, Sea Limited trades at a market cap of $43 billion. With robust gaming, e-commerce, and payments divisions, Sea is now doing over $11 billion in annual revenue and is growing its trailing-12-month revenue at over 100% year over year.
There have been some signs of a recent slowdown in the business, especially with gaming, which could hurt the company's financials in the short run. But over the long term, if you believe in the growth of Free Fire, Shoppee, and Sea Money, now could be a good time to pick up some shares of this stock.
