Official Statement on Garena PH Closure

Much had been said about what is happening not only to Garena PH but also to the future of local offices of Garena in Southeast Asia. What will be the future of League of Legends, Arena of Valor, Free Fire and other Garena games? What will happen to local servers? In this article, we will share a Statement from Sea to clarify any misconception.

Statement from Sea

We regularly review our operations to align resource allocation with our business objectives. With mobile penetration in the region rising rapidly, we have an increasing focus on the mobile-first generation for all our businesses. In fact, while we are firmly embedded as the regional leader in online PC games, we see rapid growth in our mobile and self-developed titles which account for an ever-larger proportion of online game activity in our region. In line with this industry shift, certain front-line PC-focused operations or maintenance roles have been streamlined as our game business continues to grow rapidly in this mobile era.

We are deeply committed to the Philippines by offering both the leading digital entertainment platform and the leading e-commerce platform to local consumers, and we continue to create jobs and increase our headcount in this important market as our business grows.

We are working closely with those involved to support their transition to new roles inside or outside our company. Our localization, community support, and esports efforts will continue as normal. Garena is also the leading esports organizer in our region and we will continue to drive the growth of esports in the Philippines and across the region.

Profitability of Garena

According to publicly available data Garena continuous to be a profitable entity. In the second quarter, Garena recorded adjusted revenues of $139.1 million and adjusted EBIDTA of $48.6 million. Also, it had 160.6 million quarterly active users in Q2.

Garena has long been the regional leader in PC games. According to facts revealed to us by a representative from Sea both mobile games and self-developed games are increasingly important for Garena. One of the goals of the company is to ultimately have 50% of Garena’s revenue from self-developed games.

According to the Q2 release of Financial Statements, it was disclosed that, in the month of June, 73% of revenues for Sea's Digital Entertainment segment [i.e. Garena] came from mobile, while 13% of total digital entertainment revenues came from self-developed game Free Fire.

Future of Garena Games

Garena games will continue to exist for the foreseeable future. Players of both PC and mobile games will not be affected by any changes that are happening right now, so it is safe to say that all of us can finally breathe easier.

According to Sea, Free Fire has become one of the world’s most popular games.

Free Fire continues to grow strongly - as disclosed at our recent Q2 earnings announcement in August,Free Fire's daily active user (“DAU”) count has reached a record high of more than 16 million.

Meanwhile, looking at the App Annie rankings, on the Google Play store Free Fire is consistently one of the top 10 downloaded apps (not just games) in 20 countries globally, and the #1 highest grossing app in 14 countries as of earlier this week. (Note that the numbers vary from day to day, but the trend is fairly consistent.)

It is also safe to note that Free Fire is also becoming one of the most popular games on Youtube’s games channel - https://gaming.youtube.com/live. Checking it as of the writing of this article puts it at #4 globally in terms of the number of people watching streams.

Free Fire was entirely developed by Sea's in-house studio which is headquartered in Shanghai.

Garena is also a co-developer and the publisher of Arena of Valor in the region. It is one of the world’s most popular mobile titles.

The AOV International Championship is being held in our region for the first time in November. It will have the largest ever prize pool in AOV history of $600k, which is one of the largest ever for a mobile esports event. The group stages will be held in Vietnam and Thailand in November, and the final will be in Bangkok in December.

In Summary and Conclusion

Garena PH is not closing down entirely.
Game experience and servers will not be affected by any changes.
Garena and its games continue to be profitable.
New games are focusing on mobile.

We would like to thank a representative from Sea, which is the parent company of Garena for reaching out to us. Its website can be viewed at www.seagroup.com.

What do you think? We would love to hear your views, feedback, and reaction. Just add your comments below.

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