It hasn't made much of a splash. But Latin America's e-commerce market has an ambitious new competitor from Southeast Asia: Shopee, headquartered in Singapore and owned by Sea, a company within the Chinese technology group Tencent that focuses on digital entertainment, e-commerce, and digital financial services.

This year, Shopee launched in Mexico, Chile, and Colombia, following two years of development in Brazil, where it is already the most-downloaded e-commerce platform in the country, according to Reuters. Shopee offers a low-cost model with low commissions to connect buyers and sellers, and it also publishes games in which players can earn points to use for purchases on the platform.

Shopee launched in 2015 in Southeast Asia and, within four years, became the leading e-commerce platform in that part of the world. Although its parent company, Sea, is still operating at a loss, its stock has attracted the market: its price rose 118% between January 1 and August 31, 2021, with a market capitalization of US$182,000 million. It’s a real threat to Mercado Libre.