Good morning and good evening to all and welcome to the Sea Limited Second Quarter 2026 Results Conference Call. All lines have been muted to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star 1. followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press the star 1 again. For operator assistance throughout the call, please press star 0. And finally, I would like to advise all participants that this call is being recorded. Thank you. I'd now like to welcome Mr. Casey Ong to begin the conference. Please go ahead.

Hello everyone and welcome to CEE's 2026 Second Quarter Earnings Conference call. I am Casey from CEE's Investor Relations team. On this call, 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. Also, 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 gap disclosures. For discussion of the use of non-gap financial measures and reconciliation with the closest gap measures, please refer to the section on non-gap financial measures in our press release. I have with me CEE's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Forrest Lee, President, Chris Feng, and Chief Financial Officer Tony Ho. Our management will share strategy and business updates, operating highlights and financial performance for the second quarter of 2026. 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.

Hello everyone and thank you for joining today's call. Our strong momentum from the first quarter has continued into the second. generated $7.8 billion in revenue, up 48% year-on-year, and over $917 million in adjusted EBITDA. Our investments have enabled Shopee and Money to continue to strengthen our market leadership while improving our user penetration. Many of our initiatives' unique economics continue to improve, a testament to our strong financial discipline and operational efficiency. We will continue to invest prudently in serving more users and serving them better, broadening our foundation for profitable growth into the future. With that, let me take you through each business' performance. Starting with Shopee. Shopee continued its strong momentum into the second quarter, GMV grew 28% year-on-year, marking eight consecutive quarters of sequential growth. And we again achieved a new high in gross order volume and revenue. We generated an adjusted EBITDA of more than $250 million during the second quarter. Our improving operational efficiency and growing skill have strengthened our unique economics. We can now profitably serve a wider range of users, enabling us to lean further into user acquisition. We have engaged and re-engaged several user groups through brand awareness campaigns, expanding our content channels and broadening our logistics offerings to cater to different preferences. This shows remarkable new buyer growth in the second quarter. Average monthly new active buyers grew more than 35% year on year, a significant acceleration from previous quarters. Average monthly active buyers increased 18% year on year, and overall buyer engagement also continued to improve, with purchase frequency increasing by 8% year on year. Our monetization strengthened further in the second quarter. Ad revenue was up more than 70% and ad take rate improved by over 90 basis points year on year. We continued to make advertising simpler and smarter for sellers. For example, pairing ads with vouchers that are personalized to buyers to increase purchase conversion and improve the efficiency of sellers' ad spend. Ad adoption and spend continued to improve across our seller base. The number of ad paying sellers goes around 45%, while average ad spend per seller increased more than 15% year on year. Our operational priorities remain consistent, improving price competitiveness, service quality, and our content ecosystem. To keep strengthening our execution across these priorities, we continued to deepen our structural modes across logistics, Shopee VIP and Content. Strong logistics capabilities continue to be a key contributor to Shopee's reputation for excellent service. We continued to make delivery faster and more reliable across a wider product assortment in the second quarter. Instant and same-day delivery gained strong traction as we captured more everyday purchases. Our instant service in Indonesia can now deliver in as fast as one hour in urban areas. We continue to extend our presence in high-frequency categories such as the groceries and the pharmacy items to serve our buyers better. Order volumes using instant delivery grew around 80% year-on-year in Indonesia, while cost per order fell by around 20%, driven by economies of skill and efficiency gains. Beyond delivery, we also made good progress in fulfillment, with order volumes up more than 20% quarter on quarter. Fulfillment benefits both sides of our marketplace. Sellers offload operational complexity and skill more efficiently, while buyers enjoy faster, more reliable delivery. In some markets, more than 60% of our fulfilled parcels arrive the next day. meaningfully higher than the platform average. The gains are especially noticeable in places where geography makes delivery challenging. For example, in Mindanao, a mountain region in the Philippines, fulfillment has higher waiting time by one to three days. Buyers can feel the difference. Listings that converted to fulfillment saw more than a 20% first-month uplift in orders on average in Southeast Asia. Second, our Shopee VIP program continued to scale strongly. Now live across Asia and Brazil, total membership exceeded 15 million at the end of June, up 45% from the previous quarter. Across Asia, VIP members contributed 24% of GMB in the quarter. Average monthly retention remained strong at around 80%, and members continued to show higher engagement spending meaningfully more after subscribing. In Brazil, early adoption has been encouraging since our April launch, with membership already surpassing 1 million. Beyond buyers, we are seeing encouraging support among both Shopee sellers and external partners for our Shopee VIP program. We have broadened member benefits across travel, dining, and entertainment. improving the program's value proposition. More sellers and partners have come on board to co-fund benefits, demonstrating the value they see in engaging our Shopee VIP buyer base. This has helped improve the program's unique economics in Asia. Third, we have continued to improve our content ecosystem to make product discovery more engaging. Orders from live streaming and short-form video grew more than 50% year-on-year, accounting for more than 25% of physical goods orders in Southeast Asia. Unique economics also improved sequentially as we further optimized our marketing spend. We have deepened our relationships with YouTube and Meta to drive order growth. Shopee affiliate orders generated by LinkedIn creators on Facebook increased by more than 85% quarter-on-quarter, with Facebook Reels, proving to be a very popular channel to drive purchases. We have now extended our Instagram collaboration to all eight of our core markets, and we are seeing promising early results from Indonesia, the first market where we launched the partnership. I'm particularly happy with our progress in Brazil, which remains our fastest-growing market in the second quarter. We once again outpaced the broader market on GMV growth, supported by increases in active buyers, purchase frequency, and average basket size. We continued to invest in and optimize our end-to-end logistics capabilities, expanding our network while ramping up utilization. We improved delivery speed, reducing average buyer waiting time by 15% year-on-year, and doubled our penetration of fulfillment orders year-on-year. These logistics improvements are also supporting our expansion of the market. We onboarded nearly 500 new official brands during the quarter, while T&B from Shopping Mall sellers more than doubled year-on-year. We still see significant headroom for growth in Brazil, and we will continue to invest in this market in a disciplined and profitable manner. I'm pleased that Shopee has delivered a strong first half of 2026. With this solid momentum, we are optimistic that Shopee will achieve the milestone of $1 billion in adjusted EBITDA for the full year. Next, moving to money. Money delivered another great quarter with continued strong growth in both revenue and adjusted EBITDA. Credit remained the primary driver of growth. Our loan book reached $11.1 billion at the end of June, up 62% year-on-year. Asset quality remains stable with our 90-day NPL ratio at 1.0%. The Philippines has become our fifth market with the loan book exceeding $1 billion. We continue to expand our credit business on three fronts, acquiring new users, Thank you very much. similar to those following today's large language models. The model learns from the full sequence of a user's actions over time capturing richer context around how customers interact with our platform. Recent enhancements to our underwriting models have helped lift approval rates by around 10% when compared to previous models while maintaining a similar level of risk.

This further reinforces the scale of our ecosystem as a durable advantage.

To further strengthen this capability, we are also drawing on more external data sources to better assess users who are newer to our ecosystem. For instance, through partnerships with local mobile operators in Indonesia and open finance data in Brazil, We have also used AI to build tools to efficiently verify a diverse range of user submitted income documents across markets, languages, and formats. Review time reduced by around 95% while maintaining a very high level of accuracy, letting us respond to credit limit requests from users almost instantly. Supported by this improvement in risk underwriting, We have been pushing harder on new user acquisition. We have found that many users begin using SPayLater for convenience and subsequently generate more value through repeat transactions, installment conversions, and adoption of our other credit products. So we have broadened the rollout of one-month interest-free SPayLater loans, giving borrowers the option to either settle their balances within the month or easily convert purchases into interest-bearing instruments. Similarly, we have been more widely offering promotional interest rates for first-time personal cash loans. Taken together, these efforts contributed to strong new user growth during the quarter. We added around 5.3 million unique first-time borrowers and our active credit users grew around 34% year-on-year to over 40 million at the end of the quarter. We also saw deeper user engagement. Average loans outstanding per user grew around 20% year-on-year. Offshopee SPLater has continued to scale well, driven by integration with National QR Payment Instructure and continued merchant onboarding. By the end of the quarter, Offshopee accounted for over 20% of our total SPLater portfolio. with this figure as high as 35% in some markets. In Thailand, we are testing a new product, the Shopee Pay Unlimited Card. It lets users pay with their SPayLater balance at any merchant that accepts card payments, further expanding SPayLater use cases. The standalone Shopee Pay app remains a key pillar of our strategy to grow money beyond Shopee. serving as a one-stop platform for users' payments, credit, insurance, and broader financial needs. In the second quarter, monthly transaction users on the map more than doubled. The Shopee Pay app is currently live in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam, and we will launch a similar standalone app in Brazil soon. In summary, money delivered another strong quarter with a broad-based growth across our products and markets. The advances in our risk capabilities are compounding. Each improvement helps us serve more users, serve them better, and reach further beyond Shopee. We are still at an early stage of growth. Only a fraction of the users across our ecosystem are using Money's financial products today, and the credit penetration remains low across our market. This gives us great confidence in money's long-term growth and earnings potential. Next, turning to Garena. Garena delivered another strong quarter with bookings growing 15% year-on-year, with profitability remaining healthy and growing well year-on-year. Free Fire anchored this strong performance. Now in its ninth year, it is still expanding its reach and scale globally continuing to join over 100 million average daily active users. Free First's longevity comes from a simple discipline. We keep the experience fresh with new gameplay and content, and we make it feel both local to the communities who play it and enjoyable for a global audience. A great example this quarter was Undersea Mystery, an ocean-themed campaign inspired by Songkran, Thailand's water festival. We integrated the theme into the map itself, creating a gateway into a new undersea realm. This extended battleground gave players fresh territory to explore and fight over, and the opportunity to hunt for powerful gear hidden in the hydro zones and fishing ponds across the map. This continued reinvention of the core gameplay keeps players engaged over time. We also rode the World Cup wave to build excitement and engagement with our players. Our Fire Kickoff campaign rolled football into the map itself, turning part of it into a football field. Eliminated players were sent to a one-on-one football showdown for a chance at rejoining the match. And a new football form let players turn themselves into a football to speed across the map and pull off surprise plays. The campaign also resonated well beyond the games. The original campaign song, Booyah Olay, became a standout organic driver of social engagement, generating over 350 million social media views. I'm also very excited about what lies ahead for our portfolio. We announced two mobile games, both built on strong globally recognized IP, Power World Online is an open-world multiplayer survival adventure game developed and published by Garena under license from PocketPair. And Monster Hunter Outlanders is a survival-hunting action game developed by Tencent based on Capcom's iconic franchise. Taken together, these titles show how Garena is expanding into new genres strengthening our development and publishing capabilities and deepening our relationships with top global partners. In summary, Arena delivered another strong quarter, Free Fire is still proving itself as an evergreen franchise, and we continue to work towards diversifying our portfolio. We remain committed to delivering the high-quality experiences our players know us for. In conclusion, this quarter's strong results underscore both our financial discipline and the strength of our business. This promising momentum gives us greater confidence for the rest of the year.

With that, I invite Tony to discuss our financials. Thank you, Boris, and thanks to everyone for joining the call. For CE overall, total debt revenues increased 48% year-on-year to $7.8 billion in the second quarter of 2026. This was primarily driven by growth in Shopee and money. Our total adjusted EBITDA was cut by 11% year-on-year to $917 million in the second quarter of 2026. On Shopee, Gross orders increased 27% year-on-year to $4.2 billion in the second quarter of 2026. And GMV increased by 28% year-on-year to $38.3 billion in the second quarter of 2026. Our second quarter gap revenue of $5.6 billion included gap marketplace revenue of $4.9 billion, up 49% year-on-year. and GATT product revenue of $0.7 billion. Within GATT marketplace revenue, core marketplace revenue, mainly consisting of transaction-based fees and advertising revenues was $4.3 billion, up 66% year-on-year. Value-added services revenue, mainly consisting of revenues related to logistics services was $0.7 billion. Shopee adjusted EBITDA was up by 12% year-on-year to $255 million in the second quarter of 2026. Money gap revenue was up by 59% year-on-year to $1.4 billion in the second quarter of 2026. Adjusted EBITDA was up by 13% year-on-year to $288 million in the second quarter of 2026. As of the end of June, Our consumer and F&B loans principal outstanding reached $11.1 billion, up 62% year-on-year. This consists of $10 billion on-book and $1.1 billion off-book loans principal outstanding. Non-performing loans passed due by more than 90 days as a percentage of total consumer and F&B loans was 1% at the end of the quarter. Garena bookings grew 15% year-on-year to $764 million. Gap revenue was up by 34% year-on-year to $747 million. The growth was primarily due to the increase in our active user base and deeper paying user penetration. Garena adjusted EBITDA was up by 17% year-on-year to $430 million. Returning to our consolidated numbers, we recognized a net non-operating income of $66 million in the second quarter of 2026, compared to a net non-operating income of $83 million in the second quarter of 2025. We had a net income tax expense of $251 million in the second quarter of 2026, compared to net income tax expense of $144 million in the second quarter of 2025. As a result, net income was up by 11% year on year to $458 million.

Thank you, Forrest and Tony. We are now ready to open the call to questions. Operator?

We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press the star one again. In the interest of time, we will take a maximum of two questions at a time from each caller. If you wish to ask more questions, please request to join the question queue again after your first questions have been addressed. At this time we will pause momentarily to address our roster. Our first question comes from the line of Piyush Chowdhury with HSBC. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Congratulations, management, on a great set of results. Two questions. Firstly, on Shopee, your investments are delivering results on the growth. So can you talk a little bit about Outlook for GMV growth and are we behind the peak investments as margins have improved sequentially? Is the unit economics improving across VIP and content and should we expect shopping margins to improve or there could be volatility in second half due to seasonality? That is first question. Secondly, can you give us an update on AI initiatives like last time you mentioned about AI shopping assistant for buyers? How have been the pilots and for sellers on your platform, what initiatives you have taken and benefits observed? Thank you.

I will take this question. If you look at the Shopee outlook for GMV growth, we still see quite good growth in Q2 as we shared in the openings. We still see the trend continues in the coming quarter. The growth has been doing well across our market in South Asia, Taiwan, and also Brazil. If we look forward for the full year, we remain well on track and confident of achieving our full year growth outlook of around 25%. That said, we want to make sure that we also anticipate and the potential forex headwind as well. As you can observe that many of our market has a weaker currency against US dollars. Q3 and Q4 also have a higher GME base. But again, we still believe that we're able to achieve the guidance we gave before of around 25%. In terms of investment we're doing, for the few initiatives that we shared before on the VIPs, on the fulfillment, our logistics, et cetera. In general, we see our eunuchnomics has been improving quarter on quarter. I think for our conference businesses, which we shared that we did an investment for a period of time, if you look at the eunuchnomics has been as good as a platform already. The new initiative, although we're still in the investment phase but in general we do see a positive trend on the economic improvement and also in general what we are doing is less a very capex heavy investment even with the fulfillment we usually take a capex light approach that we don't own the fulfillment centers but usually we rent a place with relatively light capex to enable the growth there. In terms of the margins, I think we shared our four-year ambition of achieving one billion in adjusted EBITDA. For the AI initiatives, we're doing quite a lot of work over the past few quarters both on buyer and seller side as you mentioned we are launching the IAM assistant for sellers in quite few of market essentially you know instead of the seller talk to a key card manager the IAM as we call it there is a digital IAM that they can talk to which can help them to answer many questions or many analysis they want to do with their shops. This is also 24 hours available, of course, compared to a kick-out manager usually not available 24 hours by 7. I think just one big example that we're working with the sellers, among many others. On the buyer side, we spend a lot of effort on both helping the ads have better conversions, which reflects in our ad take rate improvement over time, but also just general conversion for our search recommendations. We've been rolling out our new GR algorithm, a generative algorithm for recommendation and search, which gives us a meaningful improvement on the conversion rate that we observed. We're also doing a lot of work on AIGC on content. If you look at our platforms, we have a lot more Your next question comes from the line of Alicia Yap with Citigroup. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hi, good evening. Thanks for taking my questions and also congratulations on the strong set of results. I wanted to follow up a little bit on the e-commerce, the Shopee question. So can management elaborate a little bit about performance this quarter and also the profitability trend for Brazil, Taiwan and Southeast Asia and also the latest competitive landscape there? And then on your On your guidance, I know that you mentioned the 25% is unchanged for the GMV growth. So in the case that if the GMV were to further exceed the guided growth rate, is that suggested that there is also further upside on the EBITDA for the second half? And then lastly, on the fulfillment investment cycle, just wondering where are we in the timeframe? Are we Are we getting closer to what we wanted to invest or are we still in the early stage of the investment cycle for the Futhun Center?

Thank you. Across the market, we see relatively good performance, both of growth and profitability. I don't think the single market trend, but relatively across the market. Regarding the competitive situations, we do observe that competitive situation to be relatively stable at this point in time. And we are able to maintain our market share. In certain markets, we are able to gain market shares as well over the quarters for South Asia and Taiwan. For Brazil, We also observed that our growth is well above the market growth levels. And we believe we're growing faster than our close competitors as well there. Regarding the balance between growth and EBITDAs, it's always a question on what's the best balance between the growth and EBITDAs. And I don't think that it's... a simple answer there. I think something we always observe both on how much we can optimize internally and also look at how fast is the market growing and of course look at a competitive landscape to do this balancing. At this point in time, we have been seeing the competitive situation to be relatively stable as I shared. So the main driver of how the balancing work will lie on how we see the market growth rate look like in the rest of the year and how much we can improve our efficiency internally for this. For the fulfillment, we believe there is still quite a lot of room for us to improve to further penetrate on the fulfillment businesses. I think right now, both in South Asia and Brazil and Taiwan, we're still ramping up the fulfillment sizes. For example, I think we share that our fulfillment grow more than 20% quarter-on-quarter. In quite few markets, it's more than double digits already of our businesses. But still, if you compare the size of our fulfillment with some of the other players in our market, especially in Brazil, or compare with the sizes of the peers in other markets, if you look at the few players with fulfillment businesses and marketplace, We're still much smaller as the size compared to them. And with the good benefits we see from a fulfillment both on reducing the speed of deliveries and enhance the buyer conversions and also reduce the effort of sellers selling our platform. We do believe this is a good investment we're taking for our platform. and also as I shared in the earlier questions, our fulfillment economy has been improving quarter on quarter, driven both by the fact we are able to optimize the cost structures. I think it's a learning process and also just take time to optimize the operations just in general. That's one. Also, as we grow the scale, with more and more sellers joining the fulfillment businesses, essentially we have better scale advantage on that. And number three is also because there are more and more buyers recognize the fulfillment businesses that we are offering. This gives us a better economics over time. Another thing that important point out is that we are also doing a lot more integration between fulfillment and SPX. So essentially to reduce the frictions between how the warehouse, the item in our warehouse moves across the entire value chain so we can realize the cost synergies and cost benefit by running both the warehouse and the logistics together. And all these things help us to build the fulfillment businesses and helping us to gain the advantages as the overall platforms. Yeah, again, we run fulfillment business in relatively light capex sessions that we don't own the land, we don't own the warehouses. When we start a new fulfillment center, we do relatively light capex to enable that. We are also experimenting more automation with our fulfillment center, which actually reduce our cost to run as well, but that's still in the early stage. We will share more when we scale more to our fulfillment centers over time.

Your next question comes from Divya Kathiyal with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much. My first question is on the e-commerce side. We've noticed that both Shopee and TikTok shop have raised commissions in several ASEAN markets this year. Could you talk about how much more upside do you think there is for this? And can you confirm if ASEAN e-commerce is now profitable? And is that something that has specifically driven the guidance upgrade for e-commerce overall for this year? And my second question is on fintech. Where do you expect money's margins to really stabilize? We did see sales and marketing expenses continue to rise. When should we expect money's EBITDA growth to re-accelerate to more healthy levels? And could you maybe just talk about any guardrails we should be mindful of in terms of NPLs, provisioning, especially as you're acquiring new users? Thank you.

When we look at the tick rate, we look at tick rates from multiple angles. I think one is how much The tick rate is reinvesting to grow the ecosystem, which is very important for us to look at. That's number one. Number two is we look at how our price competitiveness is in our platform. So essentially after tick rate, do we still maintain a similar gap of price leadership or not compared to the other platforms? Number three is we also look at The price of e-commerce essentially on our platform versus the offline pricing. Number four, we also look at what does it mean for sellers' profitability. I think we put all the things together in terms of consideration for the take rate. From what we observed so far, we have been seeing very healthy ecosystems, even with the increase of take rate. and the reason for that is that we reinvest a large part of the tick rate to the ecosystem growth as well and also that we're able to help the seller to operate online more efficiently over time with the combination of all the things our price is still very competitive not only compared to the other marketplaces in our market but also compared to the offline alternatives in the market. Going forward, we still see opportunities to increase our tick rate, not only from commissions, but also from the pay ads that we're being able to penetrate more and more over time. Although you can argue that the fixed commissions probably has the pace of the fixed commission will be less than we observed before. But again, there is still room for us to increase the overall take rate by both helping the sellers to operate more efficient, but also helping the sellers grow their volumes by reinvesting part of the things to the ecosystem and also increase the conversion potentials from the buyer side with all the things together. I think we're able to grow this even more over time. On the money margin questions, if you look at the individual countries of the money businesses, if you look at the EBITDA over the outstanding It has been relatively consistent. Our NPL has been relatively stable as well over time. I think that typically when we operate, we look at product by product, by countries, by segment. And the shift of the retail asset is primarily driven by the mix of these things. For example, certain countries, for example, let's say in Thailand or in Malaysia, which is a later country that grows more than the previous countries, the overall ROA is slightly lower, so which kind of like, you know, we mix together, it reflects to the overall numbers. For example, some of the offshore PSPL lending growth, which is quite meaningful. More than 20% of the total SPL already as far as sharing openly has naturally lower ROAs compared to the unshoppy SPLs. For example, we've been trying to penetrate more to prime segment users which naturally have slightly lower interest rate, etc. And all those growths are intentional. and as you observe from the number that it does require some investment sometimes when we grow into the segment and sometimes it does mean that we're able to grow the outstanding a lot more but we're slightly lower ROAs compared to the previous segment or countries or products we focus on. So we actually see this as a positive movement rather than the nexus views out of this. Our gut view is very simple. We want to maintain stable NPL for the segment of the product in the countries when we look at it. And when we grow a new segment, new product, new countries, we wanted to make sure it brings a positive return of the asset to us. That's why as a consequence, we always see that our absolute EBITDA, every profit from money has been growing quarter on quarter.

Your next question comes from John Chui with Daiwa. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking my question and congrats on a very strong quarter. I want to focus on a little bit on Shopee's advertising take rate. I think Forrest also mentioned in his prepared remarks that ad take rate was pretty strong for a few reasons, but I think it was up by more than 90 basis points. How further upside do we see? And I think you guys also mentioned the advertisers seem to be more keen and taking up more of this. So what are the AI technologies that we're implementing? to further improve this ad take rate. And how much more room do we see? And my second question is on money, particularly for Brazil. I think also in the slides, you also said Greg's going to launch something, a standalone app in Brazil. What will be the strategy? Should we be expecting somewhat similar to the Southeast Asian market?

Thank you. On the ads growth, We do see a pretty good growth on the ads as we shared in the remarks. I think there are a few things helping the ad growth. I'm just listing some of the examples. One of the things, smart voucher, which is we kind of combine a personalized voucher from a buyer together with ads. So we enhance the seller's ad traffic, increasing the purchase conversions. Another example is we have the SHOCK GNV MEX smart diagnosis tools. So essentially these AI diagnosis reports and tools to help the seller to analyze how can we have better return on the ad. It leverages on the AI capability to analyze the ad's performance and drive improvement. We also have in-depth audience insights for Brand Max. This feature essentially allows the more seller to view the number of shoppers in each stage of their purchase journey and how does the shopper move between stages. This will give them a more robust and algorithm-driven branding solution to capture the buyers better across their life cycles. with the seller. And on top of that, there's also quite a lot of fundamental improvement on the algorithm for the ads, both on how can we match the buyer's intention to the ad product better. I think that's where the AI-based algorithm, the GI algorithm helps quite a lot when we come to the matching part. The other part is the content presentation. We're using a lot of AI tools to create better personalized content for the user when they see the ads. So all this in combination helps our ad take rate to improve. In the coming quarters, we still see that meaningful potential to increase the ad take rate, giving that many of the Many of the tools, many of the algorithms we are implementing are still in progress. We can see meaningful optimization potentials while we are doing more experiments, while we are optimizing algorithms further in the coming quarters. For Brazil, on the money side, we do believe that money has a big potential in Brazil. We are seeing very good growth in Brazil for our lending businesses in the past two quarters. We were launching an app which is similar to Shopify Pay app in Brazil, but with the FAFI license, which means we will be similar to what Mercado Pago or other players in the market can offer. in Brazil. We believe that Brazil is quite a big market for financial services which is proven by a few other players in the market with our e-commerce user base, our e-commerce data and also with our better credit scoring We are able to broaden our products in Brazil over time. If you compare what we offer and what the other players offer, there are many low-hanging fruits that we believe that we can capture just by doing the right product structures. Your next question comes from Navin Killa with UBS. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hi, good evening and thank you for the opportunity. Two questions from me, firstly on the e-commerce business. So obviously we have seen the margins kind of stabilize over the last couple of quarters after inching down through the later part of last year. I just wanted to understand from here on and back to your medium term kind of aspiration of 2% to 3%, if you could help us understand the path, the time frame, and how you get there. So that's, I guess, just a question on long-term margin evolution for e-commerce. And secondly, on money, you did mention, for example, that the average loan size is up some 20 odd percent compared to last year. Now, as your loan ticket size increases, does the credit risk also increase or You know, if I could also just, you know, understand what the timeframe of these loans is, the duration of these loans is, to get a better sense of, you know, how the credit risk is being managed with a larger loan book per customer.

We still believe that 2 to 3% is quite within our reach for the year. If the percentage, I think, in fact, the sum of market are well above that. I think the balance between growth and probability is something I shared in the previous answers. We do believe this is still a dynamic process on how do we make sure we capture the potential of the growth of the market versus taking more profit out of the ecosystem. I think this is something we'll balance all the times, but the path to, if you look at the numbers, the path from where we are to 26% is relatively straightforward. Now we are 0.67% or so, and we're talking about one plus percent to get where we are, and part of that will come from Over time, we don't need to invest so much in many of the things we invest in. Like many of the programs we are doing right now, you will get mature over time. I think we just invest less into it. Part of that comes from our cost improvement, fundamental cost structure improvements. For example, our logistics, our procurement cost structure improvements over time. Part of that comes from and so on. We do see, as you mentioned, the outstanding per user increase year to year. I think part of that is because we are reaching out to a new prime segment of users who naturally and many more. We also see a stable credit risk within the country, within the segment, within the product. So we didn't see any correlation between the increase of the outstanding per user and the increase of credit risk here. The duration of the large loan, it depends on the product countries. Some can be as long as 18 months. Some of them can be 12 months, et cetera. But that's a relatively small percentage for very good prime users. or for some specific lending products like the off-site motorcycles that require a longer period.

Your next question comes from Xiang Zhou with Barclays. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thank you so much for taking my questions. Please let me add my congrats as well. I have two follow-up questions around e-commerce. The first one is that you talked about a full year of 26 EBITDA to be over a billion. That would suggest a higher EBITDA for the second half than the first half, which is different from last year. I think last year the second half EBITDA was lower than the first half. So I was hoping you can talk about the drivers behind that phenomena this year compared to last year. Did that also imply that perhaps your margins may be a bit better in the second half than the first half as well? My second question is back to Brazil. One of your key competitors in Brazil talked about the momentum they are seeing by lowering some of the take rates there and lowering the free shipping threshold. But that clearly hasn't stopped you from growing very, very fast. Could you just talk about Your profitability outlook in Brazil in the coming quarters and years.

Thank you. As you already pointed out, we share the goal of more than 1 billion EBITDA this year. If you do the math, it does mean that in the absolute terms, our EBITDA for The second half of the year will be higher than the first half of the year. Of course, partially because of the growth of the market. Essentially, the overall GMV, we believe that we still see quarter over quarter growth. So the second half of the year, GMV base will be better than the first half of the year. Part of that comes from the continued work of all the initiatives we talked about. But again, the e-commerce is a business that kind of we adjust the pace, adjust the maximization based on many parameters as I shared earlier based on how we are optimizing the businesses based on how the overall business growth of the country and also based on how the competitive vision is. For Brazil, yes, I think your observations is absolutely correct. We still see that our growth is well above the market in the country. And if you look at the price competitiveness, we are still very price competitive, a lot stronger than the competitor in the region, even after their change on the take rate and free shipping threshold. So we believe that for e-commerce businesses, The fundamentals still hold. It's the price components of our assortment, it's the completeness of our assortment, it's the fundamental structure of cost to service, and it's experience of how the buyers can discover the product on our platform. And all those things help us to grow faster in the market in Brazil. If you look forward, we still believe that Brazil has a long way to go in terms of e-commerce growth. We are hoping to grow in Brazil in a profitable fashion with the growth rate outpaced the market in the coming quarters.

Your next question comes from the line of Ranjan Sharma with JP Morgan. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hi. Thank you so much for the opportunity and the presentation. Two questions from my side. Firstly, on the gaming. We discussed new publishing rights. Can you also help us understand which geographies do they cover? And also, early in the year, we talked about a possible Naruto collab coming back, if you can remind us when that's going to be. The second question is on fintech. We noticed that the provisions for credit losses have increased quite a bit this quarter. What are the trends that you're seeing in delinquencies, and how does that affect your loan growth going forward? Thank you.

Hi Reggie, thank you for your question. I think for the new publishing games, like we specifically talked about two games this quarter, one is Powered Online and since this game is our self-developed game, so we're going to publish it globally and we probably will going to launch the game like a market by market and gradually so, but like the plans we're going to this will be like a Thank you for this global publishing opportunity for us. And for the Monster Hunter Outlander, this is a great collaboration between Garena and Tencent. Tencent developed the game and also worked together with this fantastic IP owned by Capcom. We targeted to launch in the market where we are very familiar, Southeast Asia, Latin America, Taiwan, and potentially we're going also to launch the game in the Middle East and some more markets in the pipeline. So the target launch time will be this year.

Yeah, I think for the provision, it's primarily driven by the loan mix. I think there are two components of our loan mix. We naturally have high provisions. One is the off-shopee SPLs. And second one is the Brazil loan outstanding. Although Brazil, we have very good outlay there, but it's a high-interest, high-risk market. So the higher mix of these two components contribute to the higher provision you see.

This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference call back over to Mr. Casey Ong for any closing remarks.

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

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