Sea Lays Off Garena Unit Staff Following Almost 1 Billion USD Quarterly Losses

Sea, the parent company that owns Garena and Shopee, is in the middle of mass lay offs following huge quarterly losses from the company.

According to a report by Reuters, more than 30 employees at Booyah!, a livestreaming app under Garena are being let go, with the app itself no longer receiving updates.

The report mentions that about 30-40 people were let go from Booyah! via redundancy.

The sources told Reuters that the layoffs even extended to the Sea labs arm, which handled experimental projects, which also lead to shutting down several of said projects.

Sea has released a statement to Reuters following the report, saying that they’ve “made some changes to improve efficiency in our operations that impact a number of roles”.

This follows a reportedly bad quarter for Sea- the company recorded a total of 932 million USD in Net Losses this quarter, more than double the losses incurred in the same quarter the year prior.

While never mentioned directly in their earnings call, a driving force of the losses could be increased regulation against Garena in India, where the popular Garena Free Fire was banned earlier this year due to national security reasons.

While that’s not to say the game’s earning no money- AppMagic reports the game is still making around 2 billion USD a month in India- but that’s a whole 33% down from the 3 billion prior to the ban.

Meanwhile, Booyah! itself is not faring well either, nearly halving its total revenue between May and June alone, with a downward trend on monthly income according to Appmagic.

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