Pacific Money | Economy | Southeast Asia

Shopee Finally Became Profitable in 2025

Southeast Asia’s big consumer-facing tech firms are finally starting to fulfill investors’ expectations.

Sea Limited, one of the largest tech players in Southeast Asia, achieved a key milestone in 2025. Not only did it turn a net profit for the second year in a row, but it did so across all three of its main business segments (e-commerce, finance, and gaming). Perhaps most importantly, 2025 was the year Sea’s marquee e-commerce platform Shopee finally made more money than it lost.

Why is this a big deal? E-commerce in Southeast Asia has long been identified as a massive market, and about ten years ago we saw the launch of major online marketplaces that were expected to dominate the sector, driving tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in transactions. In Indonesia, this led to the birth of tech unicorns like Tokopedia and Bukalapak. In Singapore, Shopee has been the dominant player.

For reasons we won’t go into here, Indonesia’s e-commerce platforms haven’t really lived up to expectations. But Shopee has slowly been moving toward profitability. Shopee’s parent company, Sea, was the first really big tech start-up from Southeast Asia to go public, listing on the Nasdaq in a blockbuster 2017 IPO. Since then, the company and the stock have been on a wild ride, reaching eye-watering heights during the pandemic before crashing back down to Earth.

After the share price collapsed in 2021, Sea got serious about cutting spending and becoming more efficient. In 2023, the company posted its first year of net profits after years of large losses, a run which it has extended into 2025.  According to unaudited 2025 financial results, net income for the year was $1.6 billion. Total revenue was $23 billion, a 34 percent increase compared to 2024.

If we dig down into the numbers, we find an important development: Sea was profitable across all segments, including Shopee. Last year was a good year for big consumer-facing tech firms in Southeast Asia. Grab, one of Sea’s main competitors in the consumer space, reached profitability for the first time. This tells us that these massive platforms with huge market share and user bases are finally starting to perform the way investors and markets expected years ago.

Sea has........

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