IN FOCUS
Hello Betamax, I still get a little nervous whenever I open a company’s financial statement. In 2018, I covered listed companies in India, where earnings season was controlled chaos. Firms with bad numbers often released them after the stock market closed, which meant late nights digging through financial statements and racing to file stories before the deadline. And because I was writing for print, there was no way to fix a bad calculation after hitting send. Get the math wrong, and the error would stare back at you in the next day’s issue. Covering private companies in Southeast Asia is a different beast. The pace is slower, but getting to the real numbers can be much harder. For listed firms, at least you know where to look: the stock exchange filings. For private companies such as Southeast Asia’s startups, there’s no equivalent. Finding the numbers can mean digging through corporate registries in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, downloading annual reports, comparing different versions of filings, and then cross-checking every figure. That’s why we built our very own SEA financial tracker. For this, we’ve pulled together official financial data from private tech companies across the region, from revenue and net profit to how much cash they have left. The idea is simple: make Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem a little more transparent – and save you from doing all that digging yourself. Samreen Ahmad, journalist
TOP STORY SEA financials tracker: Glints’ net loss narrows 33%
Photo credit: Glints
Our latest addition to the tracker is Glints. Keeping pace with its 2024 performance, the Singapore-based recruitment platform posted revenue of US$36 million in 2025, up 4% from the previous year. Glints operates across Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, and the Philippines. Its clients include home services platform Luce, travel-focused AI chatbot firm Tripla, and people management platform Quokka.
SPOTLIGHT Shein’s profit squeeze deepens
Photo credit: Shein
Shein’s latest quarterly results suggest that the pressures already visible in its 2024 financials have only intensified. In its first quarterly earnings report since listing in Hong Kong, the fast-fashion giant recorded a 67% drop in adjusted net profit to US$228 million, while its sales grew just 0.9% in the June quarter. The biggest drags were rising freight costs linked to conflict in the Middle East and weakening demand in Europe. The latter is particularly significant because Europe was central to Shein’s IPO growth story. The results extend a trend already apparent in the company’s 2024 numbers. Revenue rose 20% that year to US$37.1 billion, but profit fell for the first time in three years. Taken together, the numbers point to a clear challenge: Shein is still growing, but turning that growth into profit is getting harder.
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