Good morning and good evening. Welcome to the Sea Limited First Quarter 2020 Results Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. If you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Ms. Yanjun Wang. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator. Good evening and good morning, everyone, and welcome to Sea's 2020 first quarter earnings conference call. I am Yanjun Wang, Sea's Group Chief Corporate Officer. Before we continue, I would like to remind you that we may make forward-looking statements which are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties and may not be realized in the future for various reasons as stated in our press release. This call includes discussion of certain non-GAAP financial measures such as adjusted revenue, adjusted EBITDA, and net loss, excluding share-based compensation and changes in fair value of the 2017 convertible notes. We believe these measures can enhance our investors' understanding of the actual cash flows of our major businesses when used as a complement to our GAAP disclosures.
For a discussion of the use of non-GAAP financial measures and reconciliation with the closest GAAP measures, please refer to the section on non-GAAP financial measures in our press release. I have here with me Sea's Chairman and Group Chief Executive Officer, Forrest Li, and Group Chief Financial Officer, Tony Hou. Forrest and Tony will share strategy and business updates, operating highlights, and financial performance for the quarter. This will be followed by a Q&A session in which we welcome any questions you have. With that, let me turn the call over to Forrest.
Thank you, Yanjun. Hello, everyone. Thank you as always for joining today's call. I hope that you are all in good health and staying safe. On behalf of all of us at Sea, I would like to thank you for your ongoing support during this exceptional period. These are times of significant change and disruption for communities, economies, and businesses around the world. Against this challenging backdrop, we are proud that we have been accelerating growth. We are reporting very strong results for the first quarter. Our communities are increasingly relying on our platforms during the pandemic. Our users are turning to Garena to enjoy interactive entertainment and socialize with their friends during the social isolation of the lockdown.
Shopee is becoming a more integral part of the commercial ecosystem in each of our markets, with consumers now relying on our platform for their staples, daily essentials, and other consumption needs. At the same time, more sellers are migrating to or relying more on Shopee to sustain and grow their business. As our economies become more online and contactless, the digital payment and financial services that SeaMoney provides are becoming an ever more important part of the infrastructure in our region. The coronavirus crisis is driving a step change in the growth of the digital economy globally, particularly in the markets and the segments where Sea operates. It has materially accelerated a shift to online lifestyles that is broad, deep, and in our view, irreversible.
Building on our market leadership in some of the key and the largest segments of the digital economy, we believe we are gaining and will continue to gain a disproportionate share of that growth. Our growth is also well supported by a strong balance sheet and cash flow from operations, and we will continue to invest in a highly prudent way to maximize efficiency. Sea was born in the middle of the global financial crisis. We believe that certain key qualities like humility, focus, commitment, resilience, adaptability, and prudence helped us survive and thrive in those difficult days when we first started our business. We believe that these qualities still define us today, and in fact, are more valuable to us in the current climate than ever before.
As businesses are stress-tested by the crisis, our resilience and adaptability have enabled us to respond well to surge in user demand while we navigate the physical constraints and disruption caused by the coronavirus crisis. For example, in all of Shopee's key markets, we have launched and dramatically scaled up our offerings of groceries, health and hygiene products, and essential household items in a matter of days. We are also doing everything we can to support economic recovery across our markets. We launched a region-wide Shopee Seller Support Package to help merchants to get back on their feet. This includes a number of initiatives localized for the specific needs of merchants and on-the-ground conditions in each of our markets.
This range from training and support programs to help new sellers move online or assist existing sellers to grow their business. To free or discounted access to our services like advertising and marketing that enable sellers attract new customers online. Furthermore, we are providing free relief for some of our seller services to ease the financial burden on them during this difficult period. Meanwhile, our growing team has quickly scaled up our capacity to meet record surge in customer demands. We have also worked hard to create new ways for our users to engage online, from creating dedicated online e-sports events so that our communities can interact with each other even as they play cards, to using our platform to raise awareness of health and safety best practices in fun and creative ways. Our adaptability ensures that our platform can support our customers and ecosystem partners when they need us most.
This is helping us build strong bonds of affinity with them that will outlast this crisis. Just as importantly, this ensures that we can continue to grow our businesses and extend our leadership even in the most testing circumstances. I'm equally proud to see how our team have come together to get aid to where it is needed most. Across our market, we have worked with local authorities to provide financial support as well as essential medical equipment such as ventilators, masks, and personal protective equipment to the hospitals and the healthcare workers on the front line of the battle against the coronavirus. This mission is to better the lives of consumers and small businesses through technology, and it has never been more important for us to live up to that mission. Let me now turn to our results for the first quarter.
On a group level, adjusted revenue grew 58% year-over-year to $913.9 million for the first quarter. Gross profit for the quarter was up 424% year-over-year to reach $206.8 million, compared to $39.5 million in the same quarter of 2019. Adjusted EBITDA was negative $69.9 million compared to negative $32.0 million in the same period in 2019. Let's look now at our digital entertainment business. Garena once again broke records in the first quarter. Adjusted revenue grew by 30% year-over-year to $512.4 million. This robust top-line growth was primarily driven by strong growth in both active users and paying users. In addition, we hit new highs in terms of quarterly active users. We recorded 48% growth year-over-year to 402.1 million quarterly active users, while our quarterly paying users grew 73% year-over-year to 35.7 million. The quarterly paying user ratio remains strong at 8.9%.
Free Fire saw particular strong growth in the first quarter, and I'm pleased to note that this strong growth extended into the second quarter. The game recently hit a new record for peak daily active users of 80 million. In April, Free Fire achieved another record high in monthly paying users, which more than doubled year-on-year. In India, our monthly paying users as a percentage of monthly active users already exceeded 10% in April. We believe this growth in our user base is attributable both to the macro trend as well as our constant efforts to engage new and existing users with fresh, creative, and highly localized content. For example, we introduced a new map called Kalahari. It features a desert theme with faster, more intense gameplay.
The Kalahari map proved very popular with our users when it was first piloted in select events a few months ago, and has since been made a permanent part of the game. We have also rolled out a number of new features based on feedback from our community, such as the ranked mode for our popular Clash Squad game mode. The Clash Squad game mode features teams of 4 competing against each other in intense best-of-7 matches that last just 1.5 minutes each. It has been a big hit with the community, and the addition of a ranked mode based on their feedback adds a new competitive element where teams can challenge themselves against the best opponents in their region. Alongside this global content pushes, our local teams are focused on developing highly localized content for our users.
In Indonesia, for example, we have partnered with one of the country's most popular actors and star of Mortal Kombat Joe Taslim to create a playable in-game character called Jota, modeled after Joe himself. To promote this, we also worked with one of Indonesia's most popular directors to create a short film with Joe showcasing his favorite martial arts skills. So far in Indonesia, over half of our users have played as Jota. This initiative highlights how this element of local flavor really resonates with our users. Similarly, in India, we partnered up with popular actor Amol Parashar to produce a series of light-hearted videos highlighting Free Fire's key features. These videos quickly went viral, and to date, have recorded over 37 million views on YouTube. With offline esports events generally on pause, we have quickly adapted and introduced new ways to sustain our engagement with the Free Fire community.
For example, in April, we hosted a special one-off global event called Wonderland Peak. This was a week-long celebration featuring special characters, items, and in-game challenges to excite our community around the world and to reward our most loyal users. It was also Free Fire's largest in-game event of the year so far, and we saw significant user number growth as a result. Moreover, we are working with local celebrity Free Fire fans to create fun and engaging online competitions that have been very popular with our users. In Brazil, our long-term partner, DJ Alok, who is one of Brazil's most popular musical artists, took part in an online competition against some of the best-known local Free Fire influencers as a warm-up for a hugely popular live set he performed across local social media channels.
Meanwhile, in Colombia, two of the country's best-known footballers, James Rodríguez and David Ospina, each captained a team of Free Fire influencers in an online charity tournament that attracted over 1 million views. In the first quarter, we recorded over 90 million online views for Free Fire's esports events globally. This is a testament to the growing reach and the popularity of this game across the world. Building on this growing and more engaged user base, we will continue to focus on developing Free Fire into a long-lasting IP and a bigger platform. The larger user base also presents greater monetization opportunities over the longer run. We are therefore fully focused on execution and leveraging the rate of strong momentum to further accelerate its growth globally. Let's turn now to Shopee. Like Garena, Shopee also recorded standout results for the first quarter and into the second quarter.
Throughout the quarter and beyond, we have been making every effort to win the hearts and the minds of our consumers and merchants during this difficult time for them. We hit a new record high for GMV of $6.2 billion, representing year-on-year growth of 74.3%. The year-on-year growth rate increased by almost 10 percentage points compared to 64.8% for the last quarter, despite the disruptions of the coronavirus crisis. We also recorded strong growth in orders, up 111% year-on-year to 429.8 million. The year-on-year growth rate of cross-border further accelerated to more than 140% in April as we saw the strong growth momentum on our platform carrying into the second quarter. In the first quarter, we further extended our market leadership and continued to rank first across Southeast Asia by downloads, monthly active users, and the total time in-app on Android, according to App Annie.
Notably, we were the top-ranked app by monthly active users in each of Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Malaysia. As we further expanded our user base, Shopee ranked third in the shopping category globally by downloads across the iOS and Google Play app stores combined during the first quarter. Adjusted revenue grew strongly to $314.0 million, up 111% year-on-year. Marketplace revenue grew even more quickly to $236.7 million, up 132% year-on-year. We believe this indicates the strength and the resilience of our platform despite the macro environment. Merchants are willing to keep investing in Shopee even in this tough time because they recognize the value that we offer, our unrivaled reach to consumers, and the return on their investment that Shopee provides. The slight quarter-on-quarter decrease in our overall and marketplace take rate is mainly due to the lockdown and other movement restrictions in the first quarter.
This disruption had a particularly significant impact on some of our cross-border merchants. As a result, we saw an impact on revenue derived from sales by those merchants. This includes revenue from cross-border logistics that is recognized on a gross basis. We also provided fee relief to our cross-border merchants who were materially impacted by the coronavirus crisis. Into the second quarter, we have seen meaningful recovery of cross-border transactions on the platform. The adjusted EBITDA loss per order declined quarter, falling by 48% year-on-year to $0.60, compared to $1.16 for the same period in 2019, and $0.70 last quarter. Our ability to drive sustained improvement in unit economics, even in this difficult environment, highlights our focus on scaling with efficiency and our disciplined approach to growing our business.
In Indonesia, where Shopee is the largest e-commerce platform by orders, Shopee registered over 185 million orders for the market in the first quarter, or a daily average of over two million orders. That represents an increase of 123% year on year, further extending Shopee's market leadership. Shopee also ranked first in Indonesia by average monthly active users, downloads, and the total time spent in app on Android in the shopping category during the quarter, according to App Annie. Our sustained focus on engaging our users continues to be a key driver of platform growth. As our community has scaled up, we are now able to drive engagement activity in a much more personalized and targeted way. For example, we launched a membership-based service called Shopee Moms Club across our markets.
This service targets mothers who use our platform and enables them to discover a unique selection of high quality curated products and brands. Some of these products and brands are only available to members. They also enjoy discounts on many common items, such as diapers. This targeted group engagement builds stronger user stickiness and activity, and we are rolling out similar targeted offerings in other categories like health and beauty. From early March onwards, governments in all our markets began to introduce restrictions on movement to curb the spread of the coronavirus. In response to this, our local teams worked extremely hard to quickly launch and scale up our offerings of FMCG, home and living, and other categories of essential and household goods. We rolled out a special program called Shopee from Home in every market.
This program was designed to encourage our users to follow government guidelines and stay home by buying their essential needs online. We also onboarded thousands of new merchants to help them migrate their business online during this difficult time and overcome the significant logistical and operational challenges imposed by the lockdown. As Shopee becomes an increasingly vital part of the retail landscape in our markets, more and more of the world's top brands are building up their partnerships with us. In early May, we rolled out a region-wide partnership with Procter & Gamble called Show Me My Home. For this innovative campaign, Shopee and P&G collaborated to create dedicated micro sites for each Shopee market that feature a curated selection of top P&G brands, categorized by different rooms of the house.
The campaign aims to give consumers a new, fun, and engaging way to find the product that they want from P&G's world-famous brands on Shopee. I'm really proud of our team for managing the business through the challenging environment we have faced in recent months. We met increased demand of our consumers and merchants in spite of significant stress test on our business and our ecosystem imposed by the pandemic itself, and the various restrictions introduced to curb the spread of the virus. We are well-positioned to continue capturing the expanded growth opportunities in the sector and further extending our market leadership. We believe that this strong leadership position, combined with the resilience, commitment, and adaptability of our team, will drive accelerated long-term growth.
SeaMoney continues to experience strong growth, propelled by increased user demand for digital payment and financial services during the pandemic, accelerated growth of our Shopee platform, and the deeper integration of our mobile wallet services with the platform. In the current climate, the overall digital economy is growing rapidly. In particular, more people are spending more of their time and money online. That is driving an increased need for both online payment services and financial services, as well as an increased need for contactless payment options. That in turn means that more people are adopting digital payments and financial services options as one of their primary channels of choice. Building on that, we are encouraged by the progress we have made in driving adoption of SeaMoney's offerings. In the first quarter, our mobile wallet total payment volume, or TPV, exceeded $1 billion.
A milestone achieved in just about a year after we started to integrate the mobile wallet service with our Shopee platform. The quarterly paying user for our mobile wallet services surpassed 10 million. More than 40% of Shopee's gross orders in Indonesia, our largest market for SeaMoney, were paid using our mobile wallet services in the month of April. Moreover, we are rapidly expanding third-party use cases and partnerships online and offline. In March 2020, we joined forces with Google to offer our mobile wallet as a payment option for the Google Play Store in Thailand. We see significant growth ahead in the digital payment and digital financial services segments, and we see that growth accelerating as the coronavirus crisis drives more consumer activity online.
We also believe that SeaMoney is in an excellent position to capture this growth as we build out our strategic leadership position in some of the largest use cases in digital payments. We will continue to focus on scaling SeaMoney effectively and efficiently to reach strong leadership positions across our key markets. To conclude, we are glad to be reporting strong numbers for the first quarter. This performance demonstrates the fundamental strength and the resilience of Sea's business and our position as the market leader in sectors of the economy that are experiencing the strongest growth. Looking ahead, while we expect to face uncertainty in the near term due to the coronavirus crisis, we believe the step change in adoption of the digital economy that we have seen in recent months is here to stay. It will experience rapid growth in our markets in the years ahead.
More importantly, we believe that these three core businesses as the leaders in their sectors, will capture an outsized share of that growth. Sea has been stress-tested in recent months due to the coronavirus crisis, and our performance under these conditions has underlined the fundamental strength and resilience of our business. This gives us confidence that we are well equipped to manage the current external turbulence and ready to capture the long-term growth opportunities. We will therefore continue to invest in our future and focus on winning the hearts and the minds of the users across all of our platforms during the time when they need us most. We believe that Sea will emerge from the crisis in an even stronger position and better prepared for our long-term growth. With that, I will invite Tony to discuss our financials.
Thank you, Forrest, and thanks to everyone for joining the call. We have included detailed quarterly financial schedules together with the corresponding management analysis in today's press release. Forrest has discussed some of our financial highlights. I will focus my comments on the other key financial metrics. For Sea overall, total adjusted revenue grew by 58% year-on-year to $913.9 million, which was mainly driven by the growth of our digital entertainment business, especially our self-developed game, Free Fire, and our continued monetization efforts in our e-commerce business in the past quarters. The 30% year-on-year growth in digital entertainment adjusted revenue to $512.4 million was primarily driven by the increase of our active user base and deepened paying user penetration. In particular, the continued success of Free Fire.
Digital entertainment adjusted EBITDA was $298.4 million, an increase of 32% year-on-year, mainly due to strong top-line growth in our self-developed game accounting for an increased share of revenue. Our e-commerce adjusted revenue of $314 million included marketplace revenue of $236.7 million, up 132% year-on-year, and product revenue of $77.3 million, up 64% year-on-year. This growth is a result of our commitment to continue enhancing our service offerings as we seek to create greater value for our platform users. E-commerce adjusted EBITDA loss was $260 million as we continued our investment to fully capture the market opportunity in the region. We will continue to invest prudently and drive high-quality growth by serving the users' needs better in the long run. Digital financial services adjusted revenue was $10.7 million, an increase of 278% year-on-year from $2.8 million in the first quarter of 2019.
Adjusted EBITDA loss was $101.6 million in the first quarter of 2020, compared to a loss of $11.9 million in the same period of 2019. This was primarily due to our continued efforts to integrate our mobile wallet services with our shopping platform across different markets. We have also been extending the use cases of our mobile wallet services outside of these platforms to include other online and offline merchants, along with a variety of third-party use cases. Returning to our consolidated numbers, we recognize a net non-operating income of $11.2 million in the first quarter of 2020, compared to a net non-operating loss of $442.8 million in the first quarter of 2019. The net non-operating loss in the first quarter of 2019 was primarily due to a fair value loss of $436.1 million arising from the fair value accounting treatment for the 2017 convertible notes.
We had a net income tax expense of $23.2 million in the first quarter of 2020, which was primarily due to withholding tax and corporate income tax recognized in our digital entertainment business. As a result, net loss, excluding share-based compensation and changes in fair value of the 2017 convertible notes, was $239.4 million in the first quarter of 2020, as compared to $237.3 million for the same period in 2019. From a foreign exchange standpoint, we have seen increased volatility in the exchange rates of some of our local currencies against the US dollar. That meant for us, on a constant currency basis, the top-line metrics would have been neutral to modestly better in some of the cases. We did not assess the differences to be material. With that, let me turn the call back to Yanjun.
Thank you, Forrest and Tony. We're now ready to open a call for questions. Operator?
We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touch-tone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. In the interest of time, we will take a maximum of two questions at a time from each caller. If you wish to ask more questions, please request to join the question queue again after your first questions have been addressed. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question comes from Miang Chuen Koh of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good evening. Congrats on the results. Two sets of questions, please. Firstly, gaming. Can you talk about what [first quarter] revenues would have been on an FX neutral basis? Which countries did the growth in active users come from? Why pay ratio for QOQ? Secondly, on e-commerce, it was mentioned cross-border was a reason for the decline in take rates. Can I confirm that this has hit your commission revenues more quarter-to-quarter than advertising and VAS? Given merchant support initiatives in the second quarter, will we likely see more revenue decline in that quarter or revenue take rate decline in that quarter? Can I confirm also FY 2020 e-commerce revenue guidance is maintained as well? Thank you.
Thanks, [Miang Chuen] . I will address the game question first. As Tony mentioned earlier, there has been some foreign exchange related fluctuations, and that means on a FX neutral basis, our top-line number, including the game revenue, could be slightly better than what we reported. If you noted that, as Tony mentioned, we assess the difference not to be material. We will continue to monitor the situation. If we think there is a need to report more Forex neutral numbers, we will do so in the future. In terms of the active user growth, it came from across different markets in Southeast Asia, Latin America, India, as well as the other markets in Middle East, Europe, U.S., Russia. I think during the COVID time, we see more people as they are confined at home in social isolation.
They turn to our game, which is highly interactive and social for both entertainment as well as the human interactions with their friends and family and colleagues. We definitely see both active user increase, pay user increase, play time increase, and that we think in the longer run will continue to drive the longevity of the IP as well as monetization. As we mentioned in earnings release, for Free Fire in April, we saw the pay user more than doubled. At the same time, for example, another country, India, where people usually do not see as a big e-sports market. In fact, it has been one of the biggest market for us for Free Fire. At the same time, we see that in terms of monthly pay user ratio, it has already exceeded 10%.
While that is increasing, we also see average revenue per user increasing, in India as well as in all the other markets. I think overall for our game side, as being a very positive trend we are observing, and we hope to outperform our full year target. If we have more data, we might update the market down the road later. On the e-commerce side, so in terms of the take rate, I think if you look at Q1. Overall, Q1 is traditionally not a shopping season. It is also a shorter quarter compared to Q4. In fact, Q on Q, our e-commerce continue to grow and growth rate in terms of GMV, year-on-year growth rate even accelerated in Q1 by about 10 percentage points compared to Q4, which is a very big shopping season for us.
This is despite all the impact that might come from cross-border and more of a total lockdown in the Philippines. This shows how resilient our marketplace is, the strength of the marketplace leadership in the Q1, despite the physical constraints and market turbulences our region might be facing. In fact, as we look at Q2, we mentioned in the earnings release that our April order actually grew more than 140% year-on-year. If you look at the different markets, we see this as a step change in terms of adoption rate of e-commerce that is with benefits disproportionately accruing to us as a strong market leader.
In terms of the take rate, the Q1 take rate drop from Q4 is mainly driven by VAS, value-added services, which is primarily cross-border logistics that we recognize on a growth basis, which means if the seller pays us $2 for cross-border logistics fees, we pay the third-party logistics providers $2. We recognize this $2 as revenue as well as cost of revenue. With that, if you look at what happened in Q1, China had a lockdown during that period, which did have impact on both cross-border sales volume as well as cross-border logistics. That is reflected in the take rate that we are looking at for Q1. Since China has opened up and resumed most of the normal activities, we have seen this has bottomed out in February and meaningfully recovered by April, and we continue to see cross-border logistics uptick in May and onwards.
We think this one is not a permanent impact on us, and we expect the take rate to gradually rise back to the previous level. Our revenue is going to be both driven by the rise take rate as well as the increase in volume itself. We're not worried about the long-term monetization of the e-commerce platform. This does not change our view. In fact, it makes us even more bullish on the e-commerce business as a whole, given the step up in the penetration rate. If you look at our markets, where the penetration of e-commerce and digital economy as a whole is still relatively low, the COVID situation actually drive a lot of people online as the offline shops are closed. Our operations remain open, and we deliver as normal in most of our markets.
Throughout this whole period, this allow us to capture disproportionate amount of growth, and also win the hearts and minds of our users with the quality of the services we provide them as well as assistance we're providing them, especially the SME sellers on our platform who are trying to move their business online. This will also be reflected in our seller commission relief program, the AID program, as well as the marketing credit that we might give to sellers. Short term, we might continue to see take rates being a bit lower than what used to be before COVID situation, but long term that does not change at all our view of the steady state take rate is achievable, and the monetization potential of the platform is also to drive further our growth as a market leader.
In terms of guidance for Shopee, at this point, we think that as the situation is still evolving daily, while we continue to see strong growth, we think we would like to update the market if there's more data later. At this stage, we don't see there's a need to change the guidance.
In the interest of time, we will take a maximum of two questions at a time from each caller. The next question comes from Thomas Chong of Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good evening. Thanks, management, for taking my questions. Given that we have seen Free Fire has reached another milestone in terms of the peak active users, can you comment about the long-term trend or the stage of life cycle for Free Fire? We're also seeing that India, in terms of their paying ratio, is also doing very well. How should we think about the longevity of Free Fire in terms of the growth momentum? Should we expect it to be a multi-year or five to 10 years kind of socially phenomenal game? Any color on that would be great. My second question is back to Shopee.
Given the fact that we may see some volatility in terms of the take rate in the near term because of the COVID, and as we are seeing the China cross-border e-commerce is also coming back, should we expect the take rate to back to year-on-year growth trend back in the second half? On that front, can you comment about, in terms of the impact of COVID in different geographies, i.e., Indonesia, Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Philippines, and Singapore. I just want to get a sense about how the GMV actually is trending because of the COVID and also the pace of recovery in different countries. Thank you.
Thank you. To start with Free Fire, I think we see very positive trends. As you mentioned, we recently hit a peak daily active users of more than 80 million. At the same time, we also see pay user increase significantly with ARPPU at a pretty steady stage. That shows that, A, monetization potential of this game is huge, and B, we think that this also helps with the longevity when you have more players playing this game and more players paying for this game. They tend to stick with the game for longer. Also given how social interactive this game is, more people play this game. That also means more of your friends, family, other people are in the game, and they talk about it as part of your social life and circle. You also stick with the game for longer.
I think that we're trying to really focus on managing and maximizing the upside of the game and building it into not only a long-living classic IP, but also increasingly a social platform. As you can see that we introduced a new map, new content in collaboration with other games as well as movie stars, football stars, and we introduced a music video into this game as playable characters acting in the music videos. These are all these features we're introducing that are very welcome and very well received by our users who are engaging with us in the game and also outside of game, in online forums, through live streaming, and watching the game videos on different platforms.
I think that there is definitely the focus on us to continue to build out this IP and this huge platform with now 180 million people interacting with each other daily. I think that is something that we are very much focused on. In terms of e-commerce take rate, we're not worried at all about the volatility in the take rate. As mentioned, Q1 volatility is more attributable to cross-border logistics, which is the revenue recognized on gross basis. As we previously mentioned, the majority of our revenue actually came from the high margin revenue, i.e., commissions, handling fees, advertisement, et cetera. These continue to be highly resilient during this period.
We do, by choice, actively gave sellers some relief and system packages to help them transition, especially those SME sellers who are more severely affected, impacted by this COVID situation to transition through this period. This is something we think we're very fortunate to be able to do from a position of strength to help our communities of sellers as well as the broader communities to help them get back on their feet. This is something that we might continue to do in the near term as they recover. On the other hand, this is something that we think in the longer run will help us win the goodwill and build a stronger and deeper bond with our key participants in our platform. This is a very worthwhile investment we're making.
In terms of the different impact in geographies, I think probably in a broad basis, three categories. One is markets where the lockdown, there wasn't a extended period of very strict or total lockdown. These are markets like Taiwan and Vietnam. Vietnam did have a lockdown, but relatively short. There are also markets where you see more extensive lockdown, that would include Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia. There's also the Philippines, that has a lockdown that also, for a very short period of time in March, that prevents all delivery. We are actually one of the first players to receive exemption from the government to deliver essential goods to our users. We also start to see the lockdown easing in Philippines over time to allow more categories of goods to be delivered. There's also China, where the cross-border impact is from.
I think these markets are different in a sense that for the markets that has relatively less impact from the lockdown, we see more normal growth year-on-year, quarter-on-quarter, like before, and we continue to grow very strongly. In markets that have more extended lockdown, where our operations still carry on as, I would say, as much as normal as possible, despite the physical constraints our teams faced, which also speak volume about the resilience and execution capabilities of our teams. We actually see even more stronger, more profound increase in demand for our services. We have been able to deliver that, and that is the markets that we think to the extent the lockdown is still in place, we will continue to see strong demand.
In markets where, like Philippines, that does affect e-commerce logistics delivery, there is a decrease in the overall volume that can be fulfilled. Again, we start to see that being eased, and as a market leader, this affects everybody, but as a market leader, I think we are still doing probably better than many other players in this regard. For China, I think that as you all know, pretty much the bottom has passed by the end of February, and we see recovery in March, April. Cross-border, we think, will be back more quickly.
In the interest of time, we will take a maximum of two questions at a time from each caller. The next question comes from Alicia Yap of Citigroup. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good evening, Forrest, Tony, and James, and other management. Thanks for taking my questions. Very quickly, I know the Free Fire has sustained really strong momentum, but just curious, out of this soft economy, do we anticipate the spending behavior will get more cautious as the macro outlook worsens and also, as we emerge from the lockdown? Then quickly on the Shopee side, any thoughts in terms of the longer-term strategy that we potentially would put more emphasis on building a combinations of the branded flagship store model versus together with the long-tail merchants? Thank you.
Thank you, Alicia. In terms of the macro outlook, of course, the situation is evolving daily. It really depends on how long the lockdown might be and how well we can address the pandemic, and the impact on the economies market by market. Overall, I think we do see game business generally to be quite countercyclical. Even during economic recession, people still need some form of social engagement and entertainment. What they might pay for game, especially in our market, if you compare to, let's say, a movie ticket or subscription of video streaming services, et cetera, that's the reason we call it micro transaction. I think this is something that's highly affordable to people still. Also, for games, Our game especially, is a large esports, highly social game.
We're targeting very broad base of consumers. Therefore, having a very large user base, and we focus on QAU, QPU, daily active users, et cetera, is very important. That gave us a much better resilience against any potential downturn. Given that our game is not concentrated in any particular market, in fact, we see in terms of user contribution as well as revenue contribution, increasing balance across different markets, including Southeast Asia, Taiwan, LATAM, India, as well as other markets. That gives us, in a way, better protection against any particular market downturn. We think in that way, we're quite fortunate to be in this business at this time. In terms of longer-term strategy for e-commerce, I think we will continue to grow both.
We see very strong growth on Shopee Mall, i.e., the branded merchants on our platform, both before COVID started and as well as during this period, as brands also started to look at online commerce not as afterthought or as a good-to-have alternative, now more as a probably more of a must-have alternative or even a greater focus, especially when the offline retail is pretty much shut down. I think we are disproportionately benefiting from that migration, and we are very focused on serving them well to retain our users and capture their growth. At the same time, we still think our market, there are a lot of SME sellers that really can benefit from our marketplace.
Shopee, when we designed it to be a general merchandise marketplace, as opposed to more of a niche kind of a marketplace or a 1P kind of a model, it's precisely because we think there are a large number of smaller merchants, SME merchants, that can grow with our marketplace and our markets. We have a unique advantage in our ability to serve millions and tens of millions of them well with very highly localized operations and high-quality management of the sellers category by category. This differentiates us from a lot of the existing players and help us grow to the market leader as we are now. We'll continue to focus on serving them well and make them grow with our platform.
In the interest of time, we are limiting a maximum of two questions at a time from each caller. The next question comes from John Blackledge of Cowen. Please go ahead.
Great. Thanks. On Shopee, any particular shopping categories that drove the GMV growth acceleration and further acceleration in April? On the 140% growth in April, just curious how the growth is tracking?
Sorry, I'm afraid to ask. Can you repeat the question, please?
Yeah. Can you hear me?
Yes, better.
Okay. Shopee, any particular shopping categories that drove the acceleration in 1Q, and the further acceleration in April? Curious the growth that you may be seeing in May. On SeaMoney, how do we think about the long-term opportunity, and also just the near term from [uncertain] and EBITDA losses, which were $50 million higher quarter-over-quarter? Thank you.
Thank you. In terms of the GMV growth, I think if you look at our traditional segments, categories that are largest on our platform include fashion, health and beauty, home and living, baby products. We see a very strong growth, accelerated growth in, particularly in home and living, health and beauty, baby products. We also see accelerated growth in other FMCG goods staple, that we're also focusing on now to meet the surges in demand. We think with the lockdown in place still in most of markets, this will probably continue for a while after the lockdown. We'll have to observe when life back to normal how much of that volume will continue to flow to us. I think what we focus on is, at this stage when the users are being kind of naturally turning to online to fulfill their needs.
These users are oftentimes the first time users. If you look at the low e-commerce penetration rate in our markets, we're not talking about alternative market or wallet share. We're actually talking about increase in terms of a baseline of new users coming naturally keen to be educated how to use e-commerce. We are their, probably, the first impression and providing a first-time experience of e-commerce to them. This is what we focus on. Whether they want to buy health products or FMCG or staple or food, we try to as much as possible serve their needs well. With our engaging experience as well as the large assortment of things, we can convert them into more frequent buyers into other products and goods as well. During this period of time, we see increase in active buyers, sellers, as well as by frequency.
It used to be between four and five. We see an increase in getting to above five, and for some markets, even above six times a month. All the other categories are also increasing. Even for fashion, which people might think is more discretionary. We still continue to see year-on-year growth in April for fashion order. I would say the other category, the order of growth probably is more pronounced compared to fashion, as now people don't have to go out as much. I think we'll continue to observe going into May. In terms of the long-term opportunities versus the EBITDA loss, if you look at our adjusted EBITDA loss per order, it's at $0.60 now, which has been decreasing year-on-year and Q-on-Q.
At the same time, if you look at our Garena EBITDA, now it's meaningfully larger than Shopee EBITDA loss for this quarter, which again, as we said many times before, that if we want to break even, we can anytime. We are focused on investing in extending our market leadership that will bring us much better returns in the longer run and profitability. We're very much focused on disciplined growth and efficiency of growth. At the same time, our view does not change that the investment in Shopee now is very effective and efficient, and it's increasingly covered by our cash generated from both Shopee monetization itself as well as monetization from the digital entertainment side, which also is enjoying strong growth.
We are in a, I would say, better-than-ever position now, and we're very focused on maximizing the upside that being presented to us under the special situations. Basically, we're fast-forwarding into the future. The reason we focus on digital entertainment, e-commerce, and digital financial services as our three core businesses is because our strong conviction in the growth of the digital economy of our region, and that these three sectors are the largest opportunities in the digital economy of our region. With the current situation, we see that the adoption of digital economy as a whole has accelerated, and the baseline has increased. All three segments that we are focused on happen to be the biggest beneficiary. We, being a market leader in these segments, again, being the biggest beneficiary within these segments.
We are very much focused on investing with discipline to capture that growth for our long-term potential.
This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Yanjun Wang for any closing remarks.
Thank you for everyone for joining today's call. We look forward to speaking to you all again next quarter.
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