In the battle royale of global e-commerce, the names are familiar and formidable: Amazon. TikTok Shop. Shein. Temu. But in Southeast Asia, home to 675 million people and a $160 billion online shopping market, the reigning monarch is an app the color of a traffic cone.
It’s called Shopee. And it’s thriving.
Owned by Singapore-based Sea Ltd., Shopee has pulled off one of the more improbable corporate comebacks in recent memory, sending its stock soaring more than 300% since the start of 2024. A key secret weapon is a little known logistics operation powered by an army of homemakers, students and retirees. And the help of some very large Ikea bags.
That operation is SPX Express, a homegrown in-house delivery network that Sea spent years building in the shadows. While rivals like Amazon.com Inc. plastered ads across the city for Black Friday and TikTok Shop flooded feeds with flash sales, Shopee was busy rewiring the infrastructure of Southeast Asian commerce one community at a time.
They’re a familiar sight in Singapore. The retired “uncle” in flip-flops, slinging parcels across a housing block in an ever-practical blue Ikea bag. Or an entrepreneurial homemaker busily sorting a makeshift Shopee kiosk beside the elevator. They’re the human backbone of SPX Express, which now handles the majority of Shopee’s several billion parcels annually.
And Wall Street has noticed. Shopee’s success has helped Sea inch toward a $100 billion market cap, on the heels of Singaporean banking giant DBS, the region’s most valuable company. The stock, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, has soared 324% since hitting a low in January last year. Of the 41 analysts tracked by Bloomberg who rate Sea, 33 of them have a “buy” recommendation on the stock.
“Sea’s significant recovery was largely driven by growth in its e-commerce business, which was executed really well during the post-Covid period,” said Hussaini Saifee, an equity research analyst at Maybank Securities Pte., who rates the stock a “buy.”
In 2021, Shopee was facing a conundrum: demand was exploding — especially during the Covid pandemic — but its delivery pipeline was buckling under the pressure. Until then, Shopee had relied mostly on third-party carriers like J&T Global Express Ltd. and Singapore Post to navigate the logistical complexity of Southeast Asia: thousands of islands, alleys too narrow for vans, dirt roads more familiar to scooters than trucks.
That changed almost overnight. As online orders more than doubled in 2021, Sea bet big on building its own logistics arm. During a 2022 Sea earnings call, Chief Executive Officer Forrest Li pledged to build up its logistics business, spending nearly $1 billion that year alone. Lowering the cost of delivering parcels will be “key to long-term growth,” he said.
It was a big risk during a difficult period. Sea had just lost almost 90% of its value from its 2021 peak. Investors were disillusioned about its money-making potential in a global tech rout, scrutinizing Sea’s growth prospects after shoppers emerging from pandemic lockdowns started cutting back on online purchases. The gaming and e-commerce giant had cut about 7,000 jobs to try assuage some of these concerns. It also shuttered its e-commerce operations in some European and Latin American markets and said it would reduce expenses to cope.
Read: Sea’s Path to Profit Paved With Layoffs, Single-Ply Toilet Paper
CEO Li brought in Hoirul Hafiidz Bin Maksom, a bespectacled 43-year-old former hospital operator, experienced in coordinating large local teams in a high stakes, time-sensitive, customer-centric environment. Over the span of two years, as Hoirul obsessed over shortening delivery timings and ways to bring down costs, Sea built up a network of delivery drivers, warehouses and thousands of collection points. The market share of its logistics operations in Southeast Asia, which was essentially non-existent in 2022, grew to about 25% in 2024, according to research firm Momentum Works.
“Covid was a great accelerator for us,” said Hoirul. “There was definitely a gap in the services available for last-mile logistics, just because e-commerce was just growing too fast during Covid. So we had to do our part and solve this problem.”
Today, SPX Express is a finely tuned operation. At midnight, sorting centers buzz to life. Parcels are unpacked, scanned, and routed via conveyor belts into color-coded plastic bags — blue, orange, green and purple — each representing a different part of the island. One such sorting facility can processes up to 400,000 parcels a day. With SPX Express, 90% of its parcels are delivered the next day in Singapore. In the rest of Asia, almost half of SPX Express orders were delivered within two days.
But what’s truly characteristic to Shopee begins after the parcels leave the warehouse.
SPX Express’ edge is in its intimacy. It’s the fact that your parcel might be delivered by your retired neighbor, or the kid next door looking to earn pocket money. People like John, a 64-year-old who’s been delivering in his neighborhood for four years, going up and down apartments in a quarter-mile radius to hand over hundreds of parcels every day. He does it for the money, sure — a little extra cash is always nice. But he also likes the community. “I’ve made so many friends, I get to chat with elderly neighbors who welcome me into their home and witness milestones of so many families,” John said.
Shopee scaled this model. Hoirul’s lightbulb moment came while walking through his public housing estate last year. He noticed that neighbors were already informally receiving parcels on behalf of others. Why not pay them? This would be easy to set up, the parcels would be safe and SPX Express would be able to leverage the existing public housing infrastructure of Singapore, where more than 80% of the population lives.
So Shopee started doing just that — setting up collection points in the very homes of the people who live in the buildings they deliver to. Shopee now has more than 3,500 of these sites, which also include shops and lockers, across Singapore. Some look like tidy mini post offices. Others are literally living rooms stacked with brown packages and a folding table.
Pearlyn Tan and her husband, a delivery driver, run one out of their flat. She handles up to 80 parcels a day. At 30 Singapore cents per package , they earn enough to cover a few days of groceries each week. Then there’s Diyana Scott, a TikTok influencer and mother of five, who turned to Shopee after losing her job earlier this year. Her whole family helps. Her kids rotate shifts and greet neighbors collecting their orders. “I made new friendships with many mothers in the neighborhood,” Scott said. “I love it.”
“Shopee’s vibrant orange is plastered over thousands of touchpoints all across Southeast Asia — delivery trucks, parcel lockers and sometimes even on the back of motorbikes,” said Jianggan Li, founder of Singapore-based research firm Momentum Works. “This level of visibility, coupled with the human touch, helps Shopee reinforce their presence in the fabric of life of locals; especially across Southeast Asia’s diverse landscape and hard-to-reach places in the region.”
By the fall of 2024, Sea’s logistics arm was delivering a majority of its own packages. It also briefly surpassed J&T Express, according to Momentum Works. SPX is also partnering with other companies like Shopify to expand its logistics services.
Ahead of Sea’s second quarter earnings on Aug. 12, the company is forecast to post a record $5 billion in revenue, according to Bloomberg estimates. Its e-commerce arm is projected to account for 72% of sales, with value-added services including logistics estimated to contribute $799 million, up 14% from a year ago. Shopee’s market share has jumped to 56% of $120 billion in gross merchandise value last year, according to Momentum Works based on the top four Southeast Asian e-commerce platforms. TikTok Shop and Lazada claimed 19% and 15%, respectively.
But SPX Express isn’t friction-free. Residents complain that they are using shared public spaces to sort parcels and local councils in Singapore often make them shift from one block to another. And the gig-like pay structure, with typical payouts of S$0.50 per parcel, mean workers often hustle longer hours to keep up with rising volumes.
Also, while SPX may have briefly overtaken J&T Express in parcel volume, margins remain tight and SPX has yet to prove that it can win outside of Shopee’s terrain as it looks to offer its logistics services to more companies. Meanwhile, TikTok Shop remains a formidable force with its tight partnership with J&T Express and deep-pocketed investment in the region.
“TikTok Shop’s emergence was a concern for Shopee because they have the capital backing from ByteDance to take market share,” said Maybank’s Saifee. “Shopee’s retention of its market share is linked to SPX Express, as well as increasing the assortment on their platform and bringing down prices by working together with sellers.”
But it’s clear that Shopee has become part of the social fabric in Southeast Asia. In Indonesia, SPX collection points operate out of warungs — small family shops that double as pickup depots. In Taiwan, they’ve been installed in convenience stores and shops filled with Shopee lockers. In Brazil, where Shopee has also expanded, the network is growing too.
John, the retiree, has witnessed first hand how fast Shopee has expanded and isn’t worried about the competition. The number of packages he delivers has tripled in four years. He knows his neighbors’ unit numbers by heart and sometimes slips the package behind their shoe rack if they’re not home. “I just take things in my stride,” said John, hurrying off with two Ikea bags full of parcels.
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
