Editing Sea Limited (section)

=== Marketing and growth strategy ===

==== Product diversification and ecosystem ====
Sea Limited focuses on product diversification, which enables the company to target a wide range of consumer groups, and attract an extensive amount of total customers. At the same time, the company has interconnected its platforms in a way that introduces customers of one sector to the others, integrating them into the Sea ecosystem. A great example of that strategy is the Free Fire, Garena's extremely popular mobile game, and Shopee's interconnection, as users of Free Fire are offered promotions and discounts for Shopee through the game. This proved successful, with Shopee increasing its quarterly revenue by $200 million in the second quarter of 2021.<ref>How Sea Limited Is Growing Larger Than Life | The Motley Fool</ref>

==== Investments and game development ====
Sea Limited was built in the success and currently relying on its digital entertainment brand, Garena. The company was the first to acquire licenses to distribute third-party, extremely popular video games to a massive geographical region. They were therefore much anticipated and Garena automatically established a monopoly in the market. However, the company's investments didn't only focus on distributing third-party games, as Garena has published many original games such as Free Fire, which was the most downloaded mobile game worldwide in 2019 and 2020 and continues to be a major revenue stream.<ref>Sea Limited Stock: This Digital Ecosystem Still Has Upside (NYSE:SE) | Seeking Alpha</ref>

Another notable investment was in subsidies to local express delivery services that led to rapid development of the industry. Until Shopee's emergence in 2017, delivery in Southeast Asia was very expensive and slow, ranging from a week for e-commerce purchases to a year for international parcels. With this investment, Shopee managed to provide delivery of 1-3 days and even offered free shipping, attracting an extensive amount of customers and led users to order via the platform even if they had originally seen the product advertised in other e-commerce companies.<ref>Here’s how Lazada lost its lead to Shopee in Southeast Asia (Part 2 of 2) | KrASIA (kr-asia.com)</ref>

==== Innovation ====
On top of that, the innovation of the company is notable, as it adapted the platform to regions it is operating and included exclusive features. It adjusted the prices for in-game purchases depending on the country, introduced its own platform currency "Garena Shells"<ref>Garena Server: What Is It? | League Of Legends Official Amino (aminoapps.com)</ref> and created game characters that represent the cultures of the countries it is targeting.

Shopee has also shown a great deal of innovation, by offering the shopping security feature "Shopee Guarantee", that freezes the payment to the seller until the buyer has confirmed they received the order in good condition. The importance of this feature is highlighted by a 14.7% increase in customer complaints for e-commerce purchases that was reported by the Consumers Association of Singapore (CASE), differentiating Shopee from other e-commerce giants, such as AliExpress and Lazada.<ref>Shopee’s new consumer protection initiative lets you shop with peace of mind (channelnewsasia.com)</ref>