Strategic Business Updates
Digital Entertainment
Driven by the strong performance of our key game titles, Garena continued to deliver robust growth in the third quarter of 2018.
Our self-developed game,Free Fire, continues to grow quickly, recently surpassing 200 million registered users globally and achieving a peak daily active user count of over 27 million, compared to our previously disclosed peak of over 16 million daily active users. Our monetization programs forFree Fire are also generating results. Throughout the month of October,Free Fire was consistently the highest grossing game on the Google Play Store in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico, according to App Annie. It is also building traction in our core markets in Southeast Asia, becoming the highest grossing game on the Google Play Store in Indonesia in late October, based on App Annie’s rankings.
On November 19, we announced a binding letter of intent with Tencent for it to grant us a right of first refusal to publish its mobile and PC games in Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore.
We believe our strategic partnership with Tencent will enhance our continual efforts to bring top quality content to our region.
E-commerce
Shopee continued to scale rapidly in the third quarter, driven by robust GMV and order growth across all our markets. Its marketplace revenue grew by 34.8%quarter-on-quarter as more sellers made use of Shopee’s suite of advertising and value added services to reach its fast-growing consumer community.
During the quarter, Shopee also continued to benefit from improved economies of scale and greater marketing efficiencies, with sales and marketing expenses as a percentage of GMV falling further to 5.7%, compared to 6.2% in the second quarter of 2018.
This strong momentum was driven by robust user engagement on the platform. At the culmination of the Shopee 11.11 Big Sale, an annual shopping festival held from late October tomid-November, Shopee set its new record with over 11 million orders recorded on the platform over the 24 hours of November 11, 2018. This represented approximately 4.5 times the number of orders recorded on the same date last year.
Other Developments
The Company announced today that Terry Zhao has been appointed President of Garena. Terry has been with the Company since its inception in 2009 and has served in a number of senior roles in our digital entertainment business across several key markets, most recently running our games studio in Shanghai. He has been heavily involved in our push into self-developed games and mobile games and, in his new role, will focus on further extending our offering in these important strategic areas.
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