Singapore — According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Mr Forrest Li is now the richest person in Singapore, with a net worth of S$26.6 billion.
He is the co-founder of Sea Ltd., which is widely perceived to be the most valuable technology company in Southeast Asia, with e-commerce, online gaming and digital payment businesses.
The global consumer internet company has 33,000 employees and is a holding company for Shopee, SeaMoney, and Garena, as well as football club Lion City Sailors FC.
Earlier this month, the company reported that its revenues more than doubled in the second quarter of this year, which explains Mr Li’s surge in wealth.
He unseats another Mr Li—Mindray Bio-Medical Electronic’s Li Xiting. Two weeks ago, Mr Li Xiting was in pole position, with his net worth at S$31 billion. His company, which manufactures ventilators and other high-tech medical devices, saw a 19 per cent increase because of the pandemic.
However, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index, published on Aug 31 (Tuesday) Mr Li Xiting’s net worth is now at S$23.67 billion.
The Mindray founder has slipped two notches down to the position of the third-richest person in Singapore, as paint tycoon Goh Cheng Liang tales second place with S$23.8 billion.
Mr Forrest Li, 43, was born in Tianjin, China, but later became a Singaporean citizen.
Last Dec, Sea obtained a digital-banking licence in Singapore, as well as acquired Indonesia’s PT Bank Kesejahteraan Ekonomi, which should “allow the group to grow its SeaMoney business beyond payments to include lending, insurance, wealth management and other financial services,” according to Bloomberg analyst Nathan Naidu.
Free Fire, Sea’s mobile game, has been downloaded over 1 billion times on Google play, and Shopee has become the second-most downloaded shopping app on iOS and Android all over the world.
The company was founded in 2009 by Mr Li, Gang Ye, and David Chen. Sea’s two other founders have also seen a rise in fortunes, with the net worth of Mr Ye, the company’s chief operating officer, now at S$14.5 billion, and that of Mr Chen at S$4.8 billion. Mr Chen is the chief product officer at Shopee.
Earlier this month, Mr Forrest Li was quoted in Forbes as saying, “Our efforts to capture the long-term growth from the shift to digitalization across our markets continued to deliver clear and strong results.
Leveraging the virtuous cycles and network effects both within and across our core businesses, we believe we are very well positioned to capture these long-term growth opportunities.” /TISG