Sea - Q1 2023

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good day, welcome to the Sea Limited First Quarter 2023 Results Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Ms. Minju Song. Please go ahead.

Minju Song (Senior Manager of Group Chief Corporate Officer's Office)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Sea's 2023 first quarter earnings conference call. I'm Minju Song from Sea's Group Chief Corporate Officer's office. Before we continue, I would like to remind you that we may make forward-looking statements which are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties and may not be realized in the future for various reasons, as stated in our press release. This call includes the discussion of certain non-GAAP financial measures, such as Adjusted EBITDA. We believe these measures can enhance our investors' understanding of the actual cash flows of our major businesses when used as a complement to our GAAP disclosures. For a discussion of the use of non-GAAP financial measures and a reconciliation with the closest GAAP measures, please refer to the section on non-GAAP financial measures in our press release.

I have with me Sea's Chairman and Group Chief Executive Officer, Forrest Li, Group Chief Financial Officer, Tony Hou, and Group Chief Corporate Officer, Yanjun Wang. Our management will share the strategy and business updates, operating highlights, and financial performance for the first quarter of 2023. This will be followed by a Q&A session in which we welcome any questions you have. With that, let me turn the call over to Forrest.

Forrest Li (Chairman and Group CEO)

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining today's call. On May 8th, we celebrated our 14th birthday. It is a chance to remind ourselves of our humble beginnings and the culture of entrepreneurship, creativity, and adaptability that has made Sea what we are today. It also gives us an opportunity to reflect on the year gone by. The last year has been testing for our teams, and I want to take this opportunity to thank all of our employees for the dedication and determination they have shown. I'm proud of how our teams pivoted rapidly in difficult circumstances to achieve our goal of self-sufficiency. We have innovated to do more with fewer resources while never losing sight of our commitment to our users and never letting our service standards fall. Our results for the quarter are a testament to their commitment and creativity.

I also want to take this opportunity to thank our investors and partners for your ongoing support over the last 14 years. The first quarter of 2023 was another strong quarter for us. Across our businesses, we are focused on maximizing operational efficiency and improving user experiences. We continued to make meaningful progress on both fronts. We deepened our commitment to achieving strong cost leadership for our ecosystem. We believe this will reinforce our structural advantages in driving profitable long-term growth in our markets. As a result, we continued to see significant year-on-year improvement in profitability of both Shopee and SeaMoney. We also achieved positive total cash flow for the quarter. Our cash equivalents, short-term investments, and other treasury investments increased by $258 million from the previous quarter. We made solid progress in elevating user experiences across our businesses.

At Shopee, we're driving improvements in both logistics service level and speed while enhancing experiences at key points of the customer journey. As a result, user engagement deepened. At Garena, we are working to optimize various aspects of gameplay and game mechanics based on user feedback, ensuring that players continue to enjoy the highly engaging and highly social experiences they associate with our games.

In the quarter and into April, we started to see some initial signs of recovery in the active user base of our largest game, Free Fire. At SeaMoney, we are expanding the product offerings and the features within each product so that our users can enjoy a more comprehensive suite of products and services that meet their underserved financial needs. We are pleased with the progress we have made so far to strengthen the fundamentals of our business.

As we continue to fine-tune our operations and navigate near-term macro uncertainties, we remain highly confident in the long-term opportunities in our markets and our ability to capture those profitably. Let's discuss each business segment in more detail. Beginning with e-commerce, we are very pleased to report that Shopee has delivered another strong quarter.

Despite the macro volatility, Shopee's business remains resilient and we have made significant progress in deepening our competitive mode by strengthening our cost leadership and uplifting the user experience. In the first quarter of 2023, GAAP revenue was $2.1 billion, up 36% year-on-year, driven by deeper monetization. Core marketplace revenue increased by 54% year-over-year to $1.2 billion due to an increase in transaction-based fees and advertising revenue.

Adjusted EBITDA was $208 million, improving from a loss of $743 million from last year. The improvement was driven by increased monetization and greater operating cost efficiency. For our Asia market, we achieved an Adjusted EBITDA of $276 million during the quarter, improving substantially from a loss of $408 million in the same period last year.

In our other markets, the Adjusted EBITDA loss was $68 million, narrowing meaningfully from last year, when losses were $335 million. Contribution margin loss per order in Brazil improved by 77% year-on-year to reach $0.34, reflecting better monetization and higher efficiency in our sales and marketing spend. As we see significant opportunities in the market, we plan to continue to invest in capturing more of these opportunities in Brazil.

Let me talk through a few specific areas we focused on during the quarter. Firstly, we continue to enhance our logistics cost leadership and delivery experience by improving the capacity and integration of our in-house logistics arm, while continuing to work closely with our third-party logistics partners. We introduced more automation to our delivery services.

Thanks to these efforts, we have managed to bring down average delivery time by more than half a day across our markets within the first quarter. We are also expanding the buyer coverage of our logistics services across our markets. In our largest market, Indonesia, which consists of more than 10,000 islands, 95% of our buyer base is now covered by our delivery services. In Brazil, we already have eight distribution and sorting centers, with the most recent expansion in Northeast Brazil.

We have also been working to expand our first and last-mile hubs in the market. In recent months, we opened 50 new hubs to further strengthen our logistics capabilities. We are looking carefully at every stage of the customer journey and improving our processes, policies, and services to enhance the user experience. We started to pilot on-the-spot returns in some markets for better services to our buyers.

We have also started handling returns on behalf of some sellers with our teams directly engaging with the buyers instead of putting this burden on the sellers. This improves the experience for our buyers who can deal with our trained teams and frees up our sellers to focus on growing their business. We are deepening our AI capabilities to drive a better user experience and operational efficiency. AI helps us recommend more relevant and personalized offerings to our users.

This has driven higher order conversion as users discover products more quickly and easily. We have also adopted large language models to improve our AI-powered chatbot's ability to understand users in different languages and return the most relevant solutions given the context. This improved resolution rates and helped reduce wait times. On top of that, AI is being leveraged to more comprehensively screen and filter items to comply with our marketplace policies.

More recently, we have further stepped up consumer protection efforts to ensure our buyers enjoying a safe, reliable, and hassle-free experience. For example, in Singapore, we launched the Shop Safe with Shopee initiative through the adoption of the Consumers Association of Singapore's standard dispute management framework, among other initiatives. These and other related initiatives are vital in ensuring that we offer all our buyers and sellers the best possible experience on Shopee.

As we enhance these key differentiators, we attract more buyers and sellers, strengthening our overall ecosystem and widening our competitive moat. Indeed, despite the more uncertain macro environment, we continue to diversify our local seller base and strengthen our relationship with other ecosystem participants, such as influencers. In Brazil, we have reached more than 3 million registered local Brazilian sellers on our platform, who now account for around 85% of our Brazil orders.

We have also seen strong traction in our Shopee Affiliate Program as we worked to empower influencers and content creators to be part of our ecosystem. This program invites social media influencers to promote our products sold on Shopee. Across our markets, we have more than 4 million registered influencers participating in our affiliate program today. In our largest market, Indonesia, orders generated by our affiliate partners more than tripled in 2022.

Across our markets, we continue to see growth in the number of brands joining Shopee Mall and in the percentage contribution of GMV from our more sellers. As a leader in our markets, we have remained focused on creating value for our brand partners through our technological capabilities. Recently, we announced enhancements to Shopee's seller tools that help brands track and understand key trends and buyer behavior, enhance consumer loyalty, and protect their IP rights.

All these efforts have further strengthened our relationships with brands. In Thailand, we partnered with the Embassy of Italy and the Italian Trade Agency to bring Made in Italy brands closer to Thai consumers. In Vietnam, we have become the exclusive partner of the government of Canada in launching a campaign to bring high quality Canadian food products to the local consumers.

Looking ahead, while there may be near-term fluctuations driven by the underlying market environment and our fine-tuning of operations, we continue to focus on building up our long-term structural advantages in our e-commerce ecosystem. We believe this strategy will be key in unlocking future growth opportunities and making sure that we have a growing and a wide-reaching positive impact across our local communities. Let's discuss digital entertainment.

As previously shared, Garena continued to focus on improving gameplay and creating a stronger community for our games first and foremost. While there was some weakening in monetization, mainly as a result of a lower paying user ratio, we saw some initial signs of improvement in our quarterly active user base, which increased from 485 million last quarter to 492 million in the first quarter.

In April, we also observed a positive user trend, with Free Fire achieving a new peak in monthly active users in the last eight-month period. While we are mindful of seasonality effects, we are pleased to see this as a positive sign for Free Fire, which remains one of the largest mobile games in the world. We will continue to monitor closely for trends going forward.

As we strengthen our efforts in enhancing gameplay and user engagement, we have received positive responses from our user community on a number of initiatives we launched to make the game experience smoother. These initiatives include game package size optimization and gameplay lag reduction, with an emphasis on devices commonly used in our markets. Our users have indicated that these recent changes are highly responsive to their feedback, and shared that they are enjoying a better gameplay experience as a result.

Our second-largest game, Arena of Valor, showed strong performance, especially during the Lunar New Year period. The game once again achieved a new peak in quarterly active users and bookings after more than six years since its launch. We believe this is a further indication of our ability to engage users for the long term with solid monetization. At the same time, our pipeline remains healthy and we will be launching some new titles in the coming months.

We have opened pre-registrations for Undawn, an open world survival game, which we will publish across Southeast Asia in the coming months. We will also be publishing Black Clover Mobile, a collection RPG mobile title based on the popular anime series Black Clover across a number of markets globally. Pre-registrations are expected to open within the first half of the year, following the conclusion of a closed beta test held last year.

As with the other business segments, we have been very focused on enhancing our operations at Garena with AI. Our current capabilities have allowed us to improve the overall efficiency of our game operations. For example, we are exploring opportunities to leverage AI to localize some of our game content and to further advance our operational capabilities for higher efficiency.

We are confident that these initiatives, combined with our strong track record in execution and localization, will help drive the long-term success of Garena. Lastly, moving on to our digital financial services business. We are enhancing our operations and risk management capabilities while improving the user experience for SeaMoney. We have also been working to diversify our Fintech product offerings both on and off the Shopee platform and across different markets to enhance user stickiness.

SeaMoney's GAAP revenue was $413 million in the first quarter of 2023, up 75% year-on-year. Adjusted EBITDA was $99 million during the quarter, a substantial improvement from a loss of $125 million in the first quarter of 2022. This was driven by both strong top-line growth and our ongoing effort to optimize costs and improve efficiency, particularly around sales and marketing expenses. On digital wallet, we continued to expand ShopeePay's use cases. For instance, it recently became a payment method for Apple services in our Southeast Asia markets. On credit, as of the end of the first quarter of 2023, the total loans receivable on our balance sheet was $2 billion, net of allowance for credit loss of $281 million.

Non-performing loans past due by more than 90 days as a percentage of our total gross loans receivable remains stable at around 2%. During the quarter, we continued to diversify the sources of funding for our credit business. In addition to funding through our own bank deposits, we have seen increased volume funded through channeling arrangements or bilateral asset-backed facilities with local and regional banks.

We are working to further diversify our funding sources to broader financial investors. Currently, a large part of our loan book is already funded by alternative sources as opposed to cash on our balance sheet. To further strengthen our risk management capabilities, we're using AI to help us to assess the fraud risk and the credit risk of our users, as well as to enhance the KYC process of our products.

This enables us to offer our financial products to more users while tightly controlling risk. We are also diversifying and enriching our product offerings at SeaMoney. We piloted new InsurTech products and expanded use cases, features, and services in our banking apps. This has provided even greater convenience and accessibility to financial products for our users.

In addition, we have further integrated many of these products into our broader ecosystem, making the user experience seamless across Shopee and SeaMoney. We remain focused on evaluating opportunities in digital financial services across our markets and enriching our product and service offerings. We are confident in SeaMoney's long-term potential and are very carefully managing the business amidst the macro uncertainties. We believe we are well-positioned to capture the significant and underserved opportunities available in our markets.

To conclude, our results for the quarter once again demonstrate the fundamental strength and the resilience of our business model and our ability to drive efficiency improvements while maintaining our leadership position. We are confident that we can continue to create value for our ecosystem participants, as well as delivering long-term growth and sustainable returns to our shareholders.

Separately, as we noted in our press release earlier today, David Ma has joined our board of directors as of May 15th and will no longer serve as the Chief Investment Officer of Sea Capital. David has played an invaluable role as a member of our leadership team. I would like to express our sincere thanks to him for his contributions in this position. I'm very glad that we'll continue to benefit from his expertise and experience in his new role as a member of our board.

With that, I will invite Tony to discuss our financials.

Tony Hou (Group CFO)

Thank you, Forrest, and thanks to everyone for joining the call. We have included detailed financial schedules together with the corresponding management analysis in today's press release, and Forrest has discussed some of our financial highlights. I will focus my comments on the other relevant metrics. For Sea overall, total GAAP revenue increased 5% year-on-year to $3 billion.

This was primarily driven by the improved monetization in our e-commerce and digital financial service businesses, partially offset by lower GAAP revenue in our digital entertainment business. On e-commerce, our first quarter GAAP revenue of $2.1 billion included GAAP marketplace revenue of $1.8 billion, up 46% year-on-year, and GAAP product revenue of $0.2 billion.

Within GAAP marketplace revenue, core marketplace revenue, mainly consisting of transaction-based fees and advertising revenues, was $1.2 billion, whereas value-added services revenue, mainly consisting of revenues related to logistics services, was $0.7 billion. E-commerce Adjusted EBITDA was $208 million in the first quarter of 2023, compared to an Adjusted EBITDA loss of $743 million in the first quarter of 2022. Digital entertainment bookings were $462 million. GAAP revenue was $540 million. Adjusted EBITDA was $230 million. Digital financial services GAAP revenue was up by 75% year-on-year to $413 million. This was mainly driven by the growth in our credit business.

Adjusted EBITDA was $99 million in the first quarter of 2023, compared to an Adjusted EBITDA loss of $125 million in the first quarter of 2022. Improvements in the bottom line were driven by both strong top-line growth and optimization of sales and marketing spend. We recognized a net non-operating income of $23 million in the first quarter of 2023, compared to a net non-operating loss of $6 million in the first quarter of 2022. The higher net non-operating income was mainly due to higher interest income from higher yields. We had a net income tax expense of $62 million in the first quarter of 2023, compared to net income tax expense of $82 million in the first quarter of 2022.

As a result, net income was $87 million in the first quarter of 2023 as compared to net loss of $580 million in the first quarter of 2022. With that, let me turn the call to Minju.

Minju Song (Senior Manager of Group Chief Corporate Officer's Office)

Thank you, Forrest and Tony. We are now ready to open the call for questions. As usual, our Group Chief Corporate Officer, Yanjun Wang, will lead this part. Operator?

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we'll pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question comes from Pang Vittayaamnuaykoon from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Pang Vittayaamnuaykoon (Research Analyst)

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you very much for the opportunity. Four questions from my side. Number one on Shopee, can you provide more color on the current trend that you see? Are we seeing any further slowdown in GMV momentum in the quarter? What kind of paid rate trend do we see now? Number two, also related to Shopee, can you comment on the current strategy for Shopee going into the rest of the year?

Should we expect to see Shopee reinvesting to grow more into the later part, or you will focus on further expanding on the margins? What type of growth should we expect? If you plan to reinvest, where will you spend money on? Number three, this will be related to gaming. Cross-booking see further pressure. We see margins continue to expand nicely.

What's the current strategy for the division? With the recent peak in monthly active user for Free Fire, are we already seeing some stabilized trend for the game? When should we expect bottom line to bottom out. Sorry, the top line to bottom out in the year? Lastly, for your SeaMoney business, why revenue continue to increase despite seeing your loan book largely flat, quarter-on-quarter? Why do we also see the provision for credit loss on SeaMoney increase quarter-on-quarter as well?

Yanjun Wang (Group Chief Corporate Officer)

Thank you, Pang, for the questions. In terms of the Shopee growth, while we don't disclose GMV quarter-on-quarter, generally overall the trend has been consistent in terms of seasonality trends we're seeing quarter-on-quarter, with last year's first quarter. If we look at more details at the different markets, Indonesia showed relatively strong performance in Asia and Thailand and Malaysia also showed quarter-on-quarter growth. Of course, we also see continue to see tough year-on-year comps for the markets. The rest of the markets are in line with the overall seasonality trends we're observing for Asia as what we saw last year.

Brazil, of course, remains a growth market for us. As we mentioned, earlier, we see significant opportunities there. We're only in Brazil for four years, so it's a relatively earlier market for us. However, we have achieved a very significant scale being, one of the leading e-commerce, players, especially on the local to local, e-commerce, marketplace, targeting mass market segments in that, country. Given our scale and, operational efficiency we already achieved there, we believe we can break even any time, but we may continue to choose to invest in the market to capture the significant long-term opportunities we observe in the market. That's a quick, capture of the overall trends.

In terms of the strategies for e-commerce, as we shared before, we think the long-term opportunities for both our Asia markets, as well as Latin American markets are very significant given the strong and positive demographic features, digital penetration, the underdevelopment of infrastructure and long-term, sorry, offline retail, which gave more opportunity for digital penetration to go even further beyond some of the what we might have seen in some of the developed markets. The early stage in terms of e-commerce penetration, these markets are at with a lot more the services that we can provide to especially the underserved mass markets that our model has shown very strong advantageous in targeting.

We continue to invest in the long-term growth of our markets. The investment will focus on both in terms of the quality of the user experiences and services. As we shared on the call earlier, we're very focused on bringing larger assortment of products in partnership with brands and SMEs in our communities. Bring better search and discovery experience, more personalized shopping experience, better customer services enabled by AI and other technologies, better returns and logistics experience to further bring the convenience to our buyers. At the same time, we also focus on the cost of the ecosystem.

We've many times have shared before that, we are very much working towards continue to bring down the cost of the entire ecosystem in terms of logistics-Payments and other infrastructure. That has been a very clear focus for us in terms of the long-term ecosystem construction. We also believe that this will allow us to capture and strengthen our long-term competitive moat. In the immediate term, in terms of the investment in the market and growth trends you might see, a lot will depend on the specific market condition, market by market and period to period. We remain very nimble and very focused from a bottom-up perspective, looking at each market conditions, both macro user behavior, competitive landscape, and other trends, seasonality, holiday season, et cetera.

Also from period to period in terms of week-by-week, day-by-day review of the markets to see what would be the best investment and in what areas we should be making. Overall, I think the long-term execution direction is very clear. In short-term, we also closely monitor the market. I think our past track record has shown that we can execute growth and managing bottom line at the same time as well. That remains our competitive strength in the long run, we believe. In terms of game trends, we are very pleased to see that there's some initial sign of quarterly active user increase quarter-on-quarter for our game and in particular for Free Fire, our largest game.

That increase was also broadly across different markets and not specific to any particular single market. This is as we share on the call, quite in line with our efforts and direction of our focus recently to continue to improve and enhance our user experience to retain and to re-attract our users to our game. This has been our focus and priority in the past periods, and we are pleased to see some initial results. We'll continue to observe the trends going forward. Moreover, we also mentioned that our second-largest game, Arena of Valor, also enjoyed a very strong performance in the past quarter. In fact, it was a new high both in terms of quarterly active user base and bookings.

All in all, we are very pleased with the results so far, and we'll continue to work towards the set direction of improving user experience. Monetization, I think is not an immediate priority. However, our margin remained, EBITDA margin remained high, compared to industry standards and actually improved quarter-on-quarter. We will remain very disciplined in terms of the bottom line and efficiency of any investment into the segment. We also mentioned some new launches that might come up in the coming months. We also will closely observe the trends in those new games.

In terms of SeaMoney, as we shared on the call, we have been diversifying the sources of our funding, in collaboration with third-party financial institutions, to fund growth of the loan book. Therefore, you observe a revenue increase, actually exceed the loan book increase. In terms of provisions increase, I think the provisions has similar trends quarter-on-quarter. But if you look at year-on-year, the products have expanded in terms of the features and tenure and types of loans we offer. There are shift in product as well as a loan book expansion. There is some shift.

Overall, if you look at, our M-NPL, it has remained very stable and low.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Piyush Choudhary from HSBC. Please go ahead.

Piyush Choudhary (Director of TMT Research)

Yeah, hi. Good evening, and thanks for the call, an opportunity to ask questions. Congratulations on good set of numbers. Three questions. Firstly, on the e-commerce, could you tell us on the industry GMV growth trends across the markets in Asia and Brazil, has it started to improve in 2Q so far? If not, when do you expect acceleration in growth? Just, you know, some color on the competitive environment. You know, what's the impact of TikTok, and how you're trying to defend the market share there. Secondly, on the logistics, what percentage of, if you can talk about your strategy over there, what percentage of orders are fulfilled by Shopee Express and orders fulfilled within 24 hours? Is there a target which you have in mind?

Thirdly, you know, company is generating free cash flow now. What would be your capital allocation priorities for growth investments? Would you restart growth investment in Brazil and, you know, in Latin America, other markets? What level will give that confidence to restart growth investments? Thank you.

Yanjun Wang (Group Chief Corporate Officer)

Yes. Thank you, Piyush. In terms of industry trends, given Shopee's relative size, and we believe generally industry trends are in line with our trends that we've been observing for our own e-commerce platform, as I shared earlier. It's hard to say what we're gonna see immediately. 'Cause on the one hand, I think our economies in Southeast Asia remained relatively resilient so far. We haven't seen while the inflation trends is still ongoing, it hasn't caused major disruptions to the economy. At the same time, we continue to see reopening trends. On the other hand, there are still global macro uncertainties.

Many of our economies are export driven, which might be exposed to risks in global or uncertainties in global economies as well. We have to observe ongoing trends closely. It's a market-by-market and a period-by-period assessment. As I shared earlier, some markets, for example, Indonesia, in particular for us, which is also the largest market for us, performed quite well and remained relatively strong. Some other markets that might be more year-on-year tough comps. Then there'll be other markets where we saw start to pick up and as reopening effects run out. On the other hand, it's still early to tell. We'll.

Again, our strategy is we remain very nimble and flexible, and we observe market very closely. This has been our strength, is being very close to each market. Having operational strengths and profitability across all our markets allow us much more flexibility to invest from period to period or from market to market, based on what makes the most sense at any particular point of time in that market. That will be our immediate focus going forward. Long-term focus of investment, as I shared, is going to be in all the infrastructure, as I mentioned. When people think about investment, sometimes people overemphasize subsidies, shipping subsidies. I don't think that's a fair characterization of our focus of investment.

Rather our focus will be on investing the long-term infrastructure that will provide better services to our customers and then lower the cost of the ecosystem. That will significantly expand the profitable TAM of e-commerce in our region and also build much stronger competitive moat in the long run for us. In terms of the Shopee logistics, we again, this is a. We adopt a very pragmatic approach to it. We look at it based on the user experience and the cost of service to users. If we can do it in any market the more effectively, efficiently at any point of time ourselves, we will allocate more to our own logistics services.

On the other hand, in markets where 3PLs has been competitive, we're happy very to allocate also more to 3PL. It's a highly dynamic process. We don't have a particular KPI that we must target. It's all based on, you know, the quality of services and the cost of services to our users and to continue to optimize over the long run. We are very keen to work with all the partners who are happy to work with us in that front. In terms of Free Fire. Sorry. Free cash flow generation and allocation, as I mentioned, investment across different markets, actually, again, it's gonna be a market-by-market assessment.

Long-term potential across different markets are all quite strong and therefore, we won't say, "Oh, we deprioritize any market and prioritize any other market." Obviously, short term, Brazil is a relatively younger market for us, as I shared. We've been in Southeast Asia for doing e-commerce for close to a decade, and we are only there for about four years. Even within four years we achieved a strong position and scale, significant enough scale to allow us to break even as we choose to. That is a very good position to be in. We also want to continue to focus on capturing more of the market opportunities there, which has a very large underserved user segment.

Is, even compared to Southeast Asia, we believe e-commerce is under-penetrated in Brazil. We have a unique advantage coming from serving underserved segments and mass market segments in Southeast Asia, dealing with highly complex infrastructure and regulatory, you know, challenges, that we believe that prepare us quite well to also continue to focus on the similar segment in Brazil. As we shared on the earnings call earlier, we opened more centers and sorting hubs as well. The other last mile helps closer to our buyer communities, especially in some of the more under-penetrated regions in Brazil. We believe there's significant opportunity there. Again, our investment and cash flow.

In terms of investing and cash flow, we will remain highly vigilant and disciplined and highly focused on the cost efficiency, because as I mentioned again and again, cost of the ecosystem and cost to serve our consumers is a key focus of our operations, and we'll continue to improve on that.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Alicia Yap from Citigroup. Please go ahead.

Alicia Yap (Managing Director and Head of Pan-Asia Internet Research)

Hello. Hi. Yeah, good evening. Thanks for taking my questions. I have a couple quick ones. One is a follow-up on the quarterly active user growth. Do you think the trend that we saw this quarter will continue into the future quarter? If we can get a little bit, you know, qualitative comment in terms of the profile of this new user, is this driven by your effective marketing campaign, or is it more driven by your content update? Second question is, I think we still wanted to get more comfortable and, you know, the sense about the sustainable EBITDA margins and also how you would balance between reinvest strategically to drive your top line growth while also retaining a certain, you know, expenses level and the margin level.

If you can elaborate, you know, what's your strategy over there will be helpful. Thank you.

Yanjun Wang (Group Chief Corporate Officer)

Yes. Thank you, Alicia. In terms of the trends for Free Fire, I think the looking at the active user base, you know, we saw some initial signs, but also as I mentioned, we continue to observe the trends going forward. We hope to stabilize also the active user base, and as soon as we can. As well that's the effort the team is also focused on. In terms of the monetization, again, this has not been the immediate focus, but as I shared before, that usually for a large DAU game, once you get a large user base, monetization usually follows.

In our past track record, we have shown very strong capability in monetizing across the different user segments and periods. In terms of the user profile and what's driving these initial positive signs. I think the user profile hasn't really changed much. It's the same target users we have originally because Free Fire is a very massive DAU game. It's one of the largest games, mobile games, in the world by DAU. It's a very broadly targeting general population and enjoyed by highly diverse communities.

In terms of the way we target them, as we shared earlier, it's by focusing on better user engagement, user experience, community building, and responding to user feedback on features, et cetera, as opposed to through marketing efforts. As you can see, our EBITDA margin actually hasn't really changed that much and actually improved a little bit quarter-on-quarter. We're very careful about the sustainability of a long-term engagement with users. All the efforts being directed at making Free Fire into a long-term franchise and a large, significant platform on which we can build on more new content and attract more users.

We think that there's a very good chance this can be made into a strong evergreen game. And in terms of the EBITDA margin for e-commerce, I think the, you know, as I shared, while we're not immediately targeting to push the envelope to maximize margin, we think there's a, you know, as a leading marketplace player, any the margin you generally see in different markets for a leading marketplace player can also be achievable by us.

In different markets, we have seen, you know, even at this early stage where we just turned it profitable for only a couple quarters, we have seen a very healthy, you know, EBITDA over revenue margin, you know, even towards like more than, you know, 30%-40% in some of the markets. That is, the margin is not the biggest concern for us. If we want to achieve high margin, I think it's doable. The question is, how do we maximize the long-term profitability and maximize the opportunity we can capture in this region and in all our markets? We really continue to see significant opportunity.

Our focus is on the long term and not immediate margin expansion. Having the support of healthy margin also give us more resources to allocate across different markets and from period to period into investing in different markets and to even further strengthen our ecosystem, as I shared, both for our long-term goals of expanding the profitable term and build strengthening our competitive moat. Also in the near term, to respond to market dynamics within each market. Again, we're not particularly worried about margin. I think it's more about how we build a healthy long-term ecosystem that will maximize the long-term profitable growth of our business.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Jiong Shao from Barclays. Please go ahead.

Jiong Shao (Head of China Tech and Internet Research)

Thank you very much for taking my questions. Firstly, I wanna make sure I heard you correctly. I think earlier you mentioned that GMV for Q1 this year was consistent with Q1 last year. Did you mean by U.S. dollar terms or by constant currency? Could you also talk about the FX impact on your GMV or revenue for this quarter? Anything you can share about the number of orders for both Asia and Brazil. Lastly, any comments about your headquarter costs, both year-over-year or quarter-over-quarter? Anything even qualitatively would be great. Thank you.

Yanjun Wang (Group Chief Corporate Officer)

Thank you, Jiong. In terms of the GMV, as I mentioned, we don't discuss, you know, quarter-on-quarter GMV numbers specifically. What I mentioned was that the trend was observing the general trend, Q-on-Q, we observed for this quarter versus last quarter, is in line as what we observed in Q1 last year versus Q4 2021. In terms of forex impact, we disclosed that for our GAAP revenue in e-commerce, on the constant currency basis, the GAAP revenue would be up 41.7% year-on-year, and on USD basis, up 36.3% year-on-year. I think that probably gives you a sense of what the forex impact is.

In terms of our order number, again, we don't discuss the specific order numbers quarter-on-quarter. You can assume that our basket size doesn't change dramatically quarter-on-quarter anyway, so roughly in line with GMV trends. In terms of HQ cost for the quarter, we continue to see improvement on the cost. Of course, adjusting for any one-time accrual reversal that we had in the previous quarter.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Varun Ahuja from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.

Varun Ahuja (Senior Analyst)

Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity. I've got four questions. First, on the gaming side, can you provide an update on the Tencent title, right of first refusal? So it's coming up for, if I understand, in September, October. How should we think about that agreement and its impact potential? Secondly, sticking to Garena on the margin side, it looks like, you know, going to launch some games in the second half. How should we think about margins given you may need to invest on marketing of those games? Look, it should trend down from current 50% that you have shown in the quarter.

Third, on the e-commerce side, as kind of mentioned earlier, that you have now turned free cash flow positive on the overall company level. What's your aspiration on the overall Latin America markets? I understand you're still operating in some of the countries as a, on a, on export basis? How should we think about it? Are you gonna reinvest in those markets you have cut back once you have sizable cash flow? How should we think about overall Latin American vision, given now that you've turned free cash flow positive? Lastly, I'm not too sure if you've given that number? What is the total loan book size? I understand $2 billion is on your own balance sheet, but overall, what is your loan book size on the CSS? Thank you.

Yanjun Wang (Group Chief Corporate Officer)

Yeah. Thank you, Varun. In terms of the, I believe your first question is regarding our commercial agreement with Tencent for game publishing. I think we mentioned before, it's an auto renewal unless either party terminates it. We are not aware of any changing circumstances, and the agreement is publicly filed, so you can refer to the terms there. In terms of the margin for the new game launches, now, I think there will be some initial marketing spent, but again, we will remain highly disciplined and will be commensurate with the performance of the game overall and remain tight on that.

We do not, at this point, anticipate a major impact on marketing because of the marketing spend related to the new game launch. In terms of the LatAm plans for Shopee, our focus is still on Brazil, which is the largest market in the region and where we already established a significant scale and leadership in the segment that we target. With respect to. Then Brazil obviously is a local commerce market for us, and it's predominantly local sellers selling to local buyers on our platform.

For the other LatAm markets that we still retain some presence, we don't have immediate plans to aggressively grow those markets, and we'll remain efficient about those markets at this time. We I think our loan book size disclosed is the amount on our balance sheet. Therefore, you know, it doesn't reflect the entire loan book size. You can refer to the past disclosure for reference.

We don't anticipate a significant increase in loan book size, you know, quarter-on-quarter immediately, given, as I shared before, overall, our approach to the credit business is focused on risk management, building up a resilient underwriting capabilities, and also better user experiences.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Venugopal Garre from Bernstein. Please go ahead.

Venugopal Garre (Managing Director)

Hi. Thanks a lot for the opportunity. Just very quick, three small questions. On gaming, you mentioned about some new games in the second half of the year. I don't know whether I missed out on the comment, but are you talking about self-developed games, or is it more related with publishing for others? That's the first question. The second thing is, you know, I'm sort of, for whatever reason, not very sure around the strategy for e-commerce and growth versus profitability. While I do appreciate a lot of comments have been made in this call, but what I want to understand is that, the focus would be more centered around sustenance of market share, and defending share or the focus would probably be, at some stage about stimulating the market to deliver growth and deliver market share growth.

The third question for me is on fintech. What do we see from here on the contribution from Singapore MariBank, given that it's still in early stages? As I understand, a lot of your regulatory capital requirements would kick in over time. Is it something which is a priority in terms of the focus area? Thanks.

Yanjun Wang (Group Chief Corporate Officer)

Yes. Thank you. The new games that we mentioned in the pipeline are third-party published game for us, not self-developed. In terms of the Shopee strategy of growth versus profitability, as I mentioned earlier, I think at this point, it's longer term, we think we will continue to invest in the long-term growth opportunities in a profitable, sustainable way that also, hopefully we can expand the profitable TAM for our region by focusing on user experience and cost to service. Short term, in terms of the profitability versus growth, again, we already achieved profitability. We're not focused on trying to maximize profitability in every market or for every period.

We are focusing on closely observing the market trends and allocate resources nimbly and adapt to the local co-market condition from period to period and from market to market. It's going to be a very bottom-up decision-making. We are doing so to again, strengthen our market leadership, but more importantly, for the long run, to expand the total profitable TAM in our markets as a strong market leader. I think that's a significant opportunity that we are really seeing. In terms of the MariBank in Singapore, it's still very early stage and so won't have any material contribution whether the top line or bottom line. Yeah.

Operator (participant)

In the interest of time, this concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Minju Song for any closing remarks.

Minju Song (Senior Manager of Group Chief Corporate Officer's Office)

Thank you, and, thank you all for joining today's call. We look forward to speaking to all of you again next quarter.

Operator (participant)

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.