2019/03/01

A New Billionaire Emerges From Singapore Gaming Powerhouse Sea

More than 40 million players log on each day to find weapons and battle it out till one character’s left standing. It’s Sea Ltd.’s marquee hit, a virtual landscape housing more people than the American population and the prime reason Chinese-born founder Forrest Li is climbing the real world’s wealth rankings. The 41-year-old entrepreneur owns 13.8 percent of Singapore-based Sea, a stake now worth roughly $1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Shares in Southeast Asia’s biggest gaming service surged 35 percent on Wednesday -- the most since its 2017 initial public offering -- after reporting a doubling in sales and robust growth at e-commerce unit Shape. Free Fire played a mega role: with more than 350 million registered users from Brazil to Indonesia, it was the world’s fourth most-downloaded game on the Apple and Google app stores in 2018.-Bloomberg



read more