Singapore's Sea Limited Pushes For Fintech Growth With Bank Acquisition

Sea Limited SE was a top performing stock in 2020, with shares up over 400% on the strength of its gaming and e-commerce businesses. The company is now looking to fintech for further growth in Southeast Asia.

What Happened: Bank Kesejahteraan Ekonomi of Indonesia, also known as Bank BKE, is being acquired by Sea, according to Bloomberg and DealStreetAsia.

The deal would follow plans by Sea to grow in digital banking across the region. The company secured a license to open a digital bank in Singapore in December.

Related Link: Why Sea Limited Is Up 240% This Year And Worth More Than Activision, Nintendo

Why It’s Important: Sea Limited has made its intentions to grow in fintech known. The company raised $3 billion in a recent stock offering that it said would be used for business expansion.

With its expansion in fintech in SE Asia, Sea Limited joins a growing field.

Grab Holdings and Singapore Telecommunications have a joint venture for fintech. Gojek, which is backed by Facebook Inc FB, paid $160 million to increase its stake in PT Bank Jago to 22%.

Third-quarter revenue rose 98.7% year-over-year for Sea Limited. Digital bookings rose 109.5% year-over-year for Sea Limited.

The e-commerce business of Sea Limited grew 173.3% year-over-year to $618.7 million.

Shopee was Indonesia’s largest e-commerce platform, with 310 million orders in the third quarter. Shopee ranked No. 1 in the stopping category in the country for average monthly active users, downloads and total time spent.

Shopee had a daily average of 3.4 million orders in the third quarter.

Sea’s digital financial services business saw growth in the quarter, as it was more integrated with the e-commerce business.

The company had 17.8 million paying users in the third quarter and total payment volume of $2.1 billion. Thirty percent of orders on Shopee were paid using a mobile wallet from Sea Limited.

The acquisition of Bank BKE in Indonesia could be integrated throughout Sea Limited’s businesses and help the company grow its e-commerce and e-wallet businesses.

SE Price Action: Shares of Sea Limited are up 2.7% to $224.41 at last check Wednesday. 

Shares hit 52-week highs of $218.57 on Tuesday.