Forrest Li, the co-founder, chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of gaming and e-commerce company, Sea Ltd, has recently become Singapore’s richest person after the shares of his company surged. 

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According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Li is now worth US$19.8 billion after shares of Sea’s American depositary receipts rose by a whopping 67 per cent this year. 

Li co-founded Sea with Gang Ye and David Chen, and the company has been valuable to South East Asia since its beginnings in 2009.

The company’s success lies primarily in its mobile game, Free Fire, which has over a billion downloads on Google Play. It is also behind the e-commerce platform Shopee, which is the second-most downloaded shopping app on both iOS and Android around the world. 

Sea also ventured into financial services recently when it won a digital-banking license in Singapore in December last year. Their digital-payment and financial-services business, Seamoney, saw payments being made by their mobile-wallet services rise to over US$4.1 billion. 

Li is closely followed by the country’s second-richest person, paint tycoon Goh Cheng Liang who has a net worth of US$17.7 billion.

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