2024 was a good year for Shopee.
According to a statement by Sea Limited, the company’s owner, Shopee’s year-over-year revenue increased by 23%. The company also saw growth in other areas:
- Total net income was reported as $79.9 million. This is a decrease from $33.0 million in 2023.
- Shopee’s e-commerce segment revenue increased year over year by 33.7%.
Shopee is an extremely popular platform in Southeast Asia, but this is especially the case in Singapore. Shopee is the most visited e-commerce platform in Singapore and boasts over 160 million downloads, making it the fourth most downloaded shopping app behind Temu, Shein, and Amazon.
Shopee’s gross merchandise value (GMV) also shows a promising trajectory. The region’s GMV grew 1.8 times from 2020 to 2022.
As e-commerce retailers know, GMV is one of the most important metrics to track and can help reveal the true performance of an e-commerce company. Read on to learn more about Shopee’s GMV.
What is Gross Merchandise Value (GMV)?
Before we dive into Shopee’s GMV, let’s review what gross merchandise value is and how the metric can show the health of a company.
According to the Cube Asia glossary, GMV is the total value of merchandise sold over a particular time period. The formula for GMV is:
Gross Merchandise Value = Sales Price of Goods x Number of Goods Sold
GMV is calculated before any feeds or other expenses are taken into account and normally includes cancellations and returns.
This metric is helpful for e-commerce retailers looking to calculate their performance rather than profitability. Shopee and other e-commerce businesses are primarily companies that connect retailers to consumers and are not involved in each transaction, meaning that it is possible that the majority of the GMV does not contribute to Shopee’s bottom line.
Who is Shopee?
Shopee is a subsidiary of one of Southeast Asia’s leading online service providers, Sea Limited. The company was founded in Singapore in 2009 and has since become one of the hottest internet retail stocks and retailers. The stock was up by 195% in 2024 and generated $4.3 billion in revenue in Q3.
While this is still a decrease from its peak in 2021, the company is poised for a profitable 2025.
Shopee is Sea Limited’s most important source of revenue, and during Q4 2023, it completed more than 2.8 billion orders (both business-to-consumer and consumer-to-consumer sales). The e-commerce segment of the company makes up around two-thirds of its revenue.
In addition to e-commerce sales, Shopee has been integrated with SeaMoney, a digital finance service, and Garena, its gaming segment.
What is Shopee GMV?
Shopee’s GMV for its e-commerce segment was recorded as $23.3 billion in 2024–an impressive year-over-year increase of 29.1%. The company’s GMV is a huge driver of the growth of its e-commerce revenue streams.
Of course, Shopee is one of many e-commerce platforms contributing to the Southeast Asian’s e-commerce market’s GMV. Southeast Asia is reportedly closed in on $100 billion GMV in 2022.
Source: ECDB
The fashion product category contributes the most (32%) to Shopee GMV. Electronics are the second biggest category at 27%, hobby and leisure contributed 14%, care products captured 11%, and furniture and homeware was the smallest category at 5%.
How does Shopee GMV compare to other e-commerce platforms?
Shopee is one of the larger contributors to the Southeast Asian region’s GMV. In fact, the company leads in GMV contribution in the region, closely followed by its competitor, Lazada.
Image credit: iPrice
There are nine major players in the Southeast Asian e-commerce market: Shopee, Lazada, Tokopedia, Bukalapak, TikTok Shop, Bilibili, Amazon, Tiki, and Sendo. Below are these companies ranked from the highest contributor to the least:
- Shopee contributed $47.9 billion to the region’s GMV in 2022. It is also the top contributor in Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia.
- Lazada contributed $20.1 to GMV. It was the top contributor in all of the above countries except Indonesia.
- Tokopedia contributed $18.4 billion to the region’s GMV.
- Bukalapak contributed $5.3 billion to GMV. This represents a huge drop from the big three (Shopee, Lazada, and Tokopedia). It is primarily used by Indonesian consumers.
- TikTok Shop contributed $4.4 billion to GMV. TikTok Shop is the third largest contributor to GMV in the Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia.
- Bilibili contributed $2.2 to the region’s GMV.
- Tiki contributed $500 million to Southeast Asia’s GMV.
- Amazon contributed only $400 million to the region’s GMV. While Amazon is a huge player in the Western e-commerce market, it has found it difficult to break into the Asian market. Singapore was the only country that showed Amazon contributing a substantial amount to their GMV.
- Sendo contributed the same as Amazon, $400 million, to GMV. Sendo is 4% of Vietnam’s $9 million contribution to the region’s GMV.
What is the future of Shopee GMV?
Analysts agree that Shopee’s GMV, as well as their other metrics, is solid . Forrest Li, the Chairman and CEO of Sea Limited, stated that Shopee and its other ventures are looking positive. Li stated that he expects the company’s GMV to grow by up to 25%, a more optimistic forecast than the high-teens percentage growth reported earlier this year.
The total GMV of Southeast Asia is projected to reach a new high of $178 billion in 2028. There is a chance that, with prime conditions, the total GMV could reach $232 billion. The company recently implemented a slew of efficiency measures to help increase its GMV, such as reducing its workforce and pulling its platform out of underperforming markets.
The Southeast Asian e-commerce market, to which Shopee contributes greatly, has come a long way in less than a decade. In 2015, Lazada shocked the region with $1 billion in GMV–a figure that has since significantly increased.
Shopee has dominated among e-commerce retailers, but some headwinds may make continued growth difficult. Historically, Lazada has been Shopee’s biggest competitor, but new players in the space are quickly finding their footing.
Companies such as TikTok Shop have cropped up and are finding huge success by using new tactics such as social selling. In 2023, TikTok announced it was ready to invest “billions” into its platform–a challenge that Shopee will not take lightly.
