It gets far less attention than Tesla, the FAANGs or even the Robinhood flavor of the week.

Yet Sea Ltd. has quietly become the world’s best-performing large-cap stock, stoking a debate on Wall Street over whether the Singapore-based gaming, e-commerce and payments company is the next great internet colossus or just Exhibit A in a global tech bubble that’s destined to burst.

For now at least, bulls have the upper hand. Swelling optimism that loss-making Sea may one day become both the Tencent and Alibaba of Southeast Asia has boosted its New York-listed shares by more than 880% in the past 18 months, the largest gain worldwide among companies with a starting market value of at least $1 billion. Short sellers who placed record wagers against the stock in June are retreating at an unprecedented pace.

If Sea Chief Executive Officer Forrest Li is paying attention to any of this, he’s not letting on. The 42-year-old billionaire said in a video interview that he’s been working seven-day weeks in the office since April, leading his company through what may be its most pivotal year. Demand for Sea’s mobile games and online-shopping platform has surged during the pandemic, and the company is bidding on a Singapore digital-banking license to accelerate its push into financial services. Li is also looking for potential acquisitions in gaming, logistics and e-commerce.

“We don’t like to think too much about our success or how we got here,” he said when asked about Sea’s stock price. “It doesn’t matter if the environment is good or bad. It doesn’t change a company or a person.”

Even by the standards of today’s tech boom, Li’s ascent has been remarkable. Born in the Chinese port city of Tianjin, he worked for the local units of Motorola Solutions Inc. and Corning Inc. before enrolling in Stanford’s MBA program. He founded Sea, then known as Garena, in 2009 and took it public with backing from Tencent in 2017.

After a rocky first year of trading, Sea’s stock has gone on to trounce everything in its class. Initially, the gains were fueled by the runaway success of Sea’s first self-made mobile game -- a battle royale called Free Fire that has attracted as many as 80 million daily active users in more than 130 markets.

But Sea’s e-commerce and financial services units are now increasingly important pillars of the bull case. Its Shopee platform overtook Alibaba’s Lazada in the fourth quarter of 2019 to become the top e-commerce provider in Southeast Asia, according to research firm iPrice, and the business accounted for more than 40% of Sea’s revenue in 2019, up from 2.3% in 2017.

SeaMoney, which offers everything from e-wallets to micro loans, could ultimately be just as large, according to Li. “We think this is a huge business opportunity,” he said.

The soft-spoken founder has some big-name believers. Tencent still owns about 20% of Sea, and the stock was the biggest holding as of May in Noah Blackstein’s Dynamic Power Global Growth Class fund, one of the world’s top-performing equity mutual funds of the past decade. Other prominent shareholders include Chase Coleman’s Tiger Global Management LLC and Kora Management LP, an emerging markets-focused hedge fund in New York, according to regulatory filings as of March.

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