Sea’s biggest challenge now may have less to do with execution than with meeting investors’ “sky-high” expectations, said Matthew Kanterman, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. In the past seven days alone, Sea’s stock has soared 28% to record.
For his part, Li appears well aware that the bar has increased. It’s been hard not to notice with everyone calling his company a Southeast Asian mashup of Tencent and Alibaba, two of the most successful businesses in history.
“We learned a lot from those pioneers,” said Li, who has an estimated net worth of $7.5 billion. “But at the end of the day, we don’t need to be their mini versions. We can just be ourselves.”
--With assistance from Lee Miller, Shin Pei, Moxy Ying, Ishika Mookerjee, Abhishek Vishnoi and Yoojung Lee.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.