Sea Ltd (SE.N), an e-commerce and gaming company, is trying to raise $6.3 billion in Southeast Asia’s largest-ever capital raising, which will harness growing investor interest in the region.
This is the corporation’s second significant fund offering in less than a year and the latest in a string of Southeast Asian agreements. The $185 billion company is looking to scale up its global operations by testing out possible new markets.
Sea, which is best known for its Shopee e-commerce platform, plans to sell 11 million American Depository Receipts, with the option to sell 1.65 million more as part of a so-called greenshoe option, according to a regulatory filing on Thursday.
It’s also looking to raise $2.5 billion through a convertible bond with a $375 million greenshoe. The share sale could raise up to $3.8 billion based on Sea’s closing stock price of $343.8 in New York on Wednesday.
According to Refinitiv data, the combined deal would be the largest ever capital raising for a Southeast Asian corporation. According to Singh, who posts on Smartkarma, Sea had about $7 billion in cash on its balance sheet at the end of the first half, and this transaction will boost that to nearly $13 billion.
Sea, the most valuable company in Southeast Asia by market capitalization, intends to use the profits for general corporate reasons, such as strategic investments and acquisitions. Sea’s Shopee plans to grow into Europe and India. Sea also received a fully digital bank license in Singapore late last year. As global investors gamble on post-pandemic technology plays emerging in Southeast Asia, fintech and e-commerce startups have been raising large sums of money.
Sea Shares have grown 72.72 percent this year, following an almost five-fold increase in 2020, when strong demand pushed people indoors due to COVID-19-related limitations.
Companies in Southeast Asia have raised a total of $15.67 billion in equity capital markets so far in 2021, the most in three years, according to Refinitiv data, compared to $11.8 billion in the same period in 2020.
Southeast Asia’s largest ride-hailing and delivery company, Grab, raised more than $4 billion in a SPAC sale this year as part of its almost $40 billion record valuation, while insiders suggest Indonesia’s largest digital group, Goto, is set to complete a pre-IPO funding exercise this year.
