Shopee to hire over 1,600 staff as battle in home markets heats up

SHOPEE, the e-commerce arm of Singapore-based Sea Ltd, is planning to hire over 1,600 full-time staff to bolster its ranks, amid an urgent talent crunch and stiff competition in its home markets.

The 1,652 new openings on its career portal are concentrated in Singapore, Manila and Ho Chi Minh City. These are mainly for roles in engineering and technology, operations, business development as well as marketing, said its website. Shopee has a global workforce of more than 33,000 employees, LinkedIn showed.

The hiring spree comes just weeks after its parent Sea Ltd raised US$6.3 billion in the largest equity offering of the year, in a move that would boost Sea's war chest to more than US$12 billion. With these funds, Shopee is boldly stepping into new markets of Poland, Spain and India.

But even as Shopee takes on these new territories, analyst Angus Mackintosh of CrossASEAN Research, reckons the company will not slow expansion on its home turf since "competition is not standing still".

The e-commerce arm of Tencent-backed Sea Ltd is not relenting, even after being crowned the dominant player in e-commerce in the region. Its hiring roadmap suggests that the company is looking to strengthen its foothold in South-east Asia through offerings like ShopeeFood, Shopee Express and ShopeePay, as rivals Grab, GoTo and Bukalapak build partnerships and look to the public markets for new funds.

Sea Ltd's beloved e-commerce arm still has room for growth in verticals such as food delivery and payments, analysts reckon. Outside Indonesia, markets like the Philippines and Vietnam - with populations of about 110 million and 97 million respectively - provide ample opportunities for Shopee to push for growth. In these countries, a rising class of Internet-savvy youngsters are increasingly turning to online platforms to shop.

In the Philippines, the company has opened 267 positions, with a quarter of in payment or fintech roles. Shopee could be turning to the digital finance space to lead growth in the country, hoping to capture part of the unbanked population while solidifying its lead in e-commerce.

The platform was the top-visited e-commerce site in the Philippines with 72.8 million visits in September, far ahead of its competitor Lazada, which clocked 41.2 million visits, data from website traffic analysis platform Similarweb showed.

"There's still a lot of market potential in the Philippines," said Kristine Lau, an associate at global research firm Third Bridge. "Right now, digital payments - credit card, e-wallets and anything that is non-cash - take up only about 10 per cent of total transaction volume in the country."

In Vietnam, Shopee is drawing up battle lines in the food-delivery and logistics space. Jobs for these verticals took up about a third of the 213 open positions in the country.

In August, it launched its food-delivery arm in Vietnam after rebranding NowFood to ShopeeFood.

Sea Ltd acquired NowFood for US$64 million in 2017, but only recently rebranded it and integrated it into the main shopping app in Vietnam, said Third Bridge's Lau. She added that it was "good timing" as the pandemic-fuelled lockdowns forced thousands of shoppers in the country online and to e-commerce platforms like Shopee.

"ShopeeFood benefited in terms of just sharing the e-commerce traffic. It was a key inflection point for the food-delivery business, when Shopee played the cards in its favour and gained market share," Lau noted.

ShopeeFood and Shopee Express will then go together well because the company can deploy drivers in a more meaningful way, by giving them jobs at both food and delivery, added Mackintosh.

Industry players are not surprised at its aggressive hiring plans. Shopee would still need to build up its reservoir of talent as it ramps up operations in new markets in Europe and India while defending its crown on its home turf. The e-commerce player is still not spreading itself too thin, they reckon, but investors are still watching the new hires and managers closely to see whether they execute their jobs well.

"After raising the US$6.3 billion, (Shopee) probably has lots of expectations to deliver growth," said Li Jianggan, chief executive of venture builder Momentum Works. "They need the people and good talent is hard to come by."

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