Internal Analysis

I. Support Activities
1. Infrastructure
- Garena has a strong financial background as they are supported by Sea.
- Garena provides an ecosystem. Not only do they Garena provide access to other entertainment
content, such as live streaming of gameplay as well as social features (user chat and online
forums on Garena mobile application, or Garena App, and Garena desktop application); they also
launch others programs supporting their games.
❖ Garena Applications
Garena mobile and desktop applications are important components of their ecosystem. Each is
designed to enrich and complement users’ game experience by offering key avenues for users to
explore and share content, connect, compete and socialize.
Garena Desktop Application
Garena desktop application provides users with access to all of the PC games they operate,
gameplay-related functionalities that enhance user experience, and various social features. Beside
log onto the Garena desktop application to launch their PC online games, players also discover
and download new PC online games operated by Garena. In addition, the application provides a
group voice chat function designed for multi-player games in which players form small teams and
play against other teams. Using this, players are able to coordinate with teammates live using
voice without affecting their keyboard operations. These functions enhance the game playing
performance and experience of their game players. Moreover, Garena desktop application offers a
game streaming feature, Garena LIVE, on the desktop application. With this feature, players can
easily stream in real-time the games they are playing to their web portal at Garena Live.
Garena App for Mobile
Garena App primarily caters to the game discovery, content sharing and social communication
needs of their mobile users. On Garena App, users can discover new mobile games offered by
Garena. Moreover, those using the Android version may download their mobile games directly
from the application. On Garena App, users may also access various forms of content, including
game-related news, gameplay strategies, videos, game statistics, as well as eSports-related
content, such as in-depth tournament reporting, live score updates, and live streaming. Easy
access to content further enriches their game experience and improves user acquisition and
retention. On the social side, Garena App offers an integrated text chatting function to allow users
to keep in touch with their friends. Garena App also hosts game forums for users to share their
views on a wide variety of topics related to games and eSports, such as drawings and stories
based on storylines or virtual characters in the games, comments on strategies to win the games
and analysis of eSports matches. Users can also socially interact with each other by liking or
commenting on posts.
❖ Vietnam Esport TV
VETV.VN is the only online electronic sports television channel in Vietnam. VETV specializes
in reporting events and electronic sports tournaments in Vietnam and around the world, attracting
an average of 17,000,000 views VODs every month on Youtube channel.
❖ AirPay, a digital financial services business of SEA, is an important payment
infrastructure supporting Garena. Airpay is an online payment channel to exchange money to
currencies in Garena’s games. Airpay allows young gamers who do not have access to credit
cards or bank accounts to pay online gaming fees by depositing money at gaming cafes or
convenience stores.
❖ Gcafe, is a management and billing system used in community Internet rooms. All
computers using Gcafe are preinstalled with Garena PCs games.
Strength: Garena is the only game publisher in Vietnam with its own ecological system, which
maximizes the experiences of users with their games and capture users’ loyalty. This also helps
them to collect data analysis more easily and control it effectively.
The strong finacial background helps Garena to dominate the market??? ý này k biết nói gì
2. Human resources management
- Garena is now having more than 1000 well-trained employees with 50 call centers spreading
across Vietnam. Garena's staff are native speakers who are well understand local tastes.
- They are recruiting and retaining talented and capable management and employees in various
markets. They opens training programs for both high- level and low- level personnel. For
examples, they open Management training programs each two years: iMap while they opens
training program for customers care staff more frequently.
- As a technology start-up, Garena, as well as Sea, attempt in attract top IT developer by
attractive remuneration. For example, the average IT developer salary is about 2000$- half the
salary of the top managers.
Strength: Comparing to VNG- another top game publisher in Vietnam with only 2000
employees for all products including 4 key groups with 29 products in total; the human
resources of Garena is much better in both quantity and quality. That’s the reason why
customer services of Garena is much better than other rivals.
3. Technology development
- Garena Vietnam is the first game publisher built a virtual LAN GGClient serving a large
number of League of Legends players. This system allows gamers to connect to each other
outside the engine room (something that other game publishers could not do before).
- Garena’s games are hosted on servers in their leased data centers managed by major domestic
and international data center service providers, as well as on cloud servers. For products in
Vietnam’ Garena uses 3 sever computers or end systems which are placed in Ha Noi, Ho Chi
Minh and Singapore. Once an end system crashes, 2 other systems will continuously work to
make sure that all the activities of Garena are normally activate. This helps minimize the
interruption of the system as well as ensure faster connections, which provide gamers a better
experience. The architecture they developed for the network of servers is designed to work
effectively in a flexible cloud environment that is highly scalable.
Strength: Garena is the pioneer in technology development in Vietnam game industry.
4. Procurement
- Arena of Valor was mainly developed by Tencent.
- Other games of Garena were produced by leading international/third- party game developers
including Tencent, Riot Games, Electronic Arts, Netease and NCSoft and licensed to Garena.
Strength: Garena games are exclusively distributed in Vietnam market. Their suppliers are
international leading game developers.
Weakness: Garena is still depend on games from third parties. Nguyên văn của Sea:
“We license the majority of our online games from third-party game developers. The term of our
game license agreements with game developers typically range from two to seven years,
renewable upon both parties’ consent. We must continually source new games that are attractive
to our game players. However, we may not become aware of, or be able to procure on terms
acceptable to us, new games that eventually succeed. We may also select and invest significant
financial and human resources in games that later prove unsuccessful. There may also be
unforeseen delays in the launch of new games. If we are unable to source or launch new popular
games in a timely manner, our game players may seek entertainment elsewhere and our prospects
may be materially and adversely affected. In November 2018, we obtained a right of first refusal
from Tencent to publish its mobile and PC games in Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand, the
Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore, subject to certain terms and conditions. Although we
launched the first game under such right of first refusal arrangement in January 2019, there is no
guarantee that we will publish more games under such right of first refusal arrangement at terms
satisfactory to us or at all, or that any games published under such arrangement will yield a
positive result.”
II. Primary activities
1. Inbound logistics
Logistic department of Garena receives sources code of games from third game developers or
mother company and transfer them to Operation associate.
2. Operation
- Translate department translate all the in-game informations into Vietnamese.
- IT department storage sources code in their servers and build it into assembly language the
upload it into data centers.
- IT team update games:
● To Free Fire: update decision based on Garena.
● To other games: update as request of third- parties.
Strength: Garena now can make decision their own on their game (Free Fire)
Weakness: Garena still depend on third- parties. As their license games from third- parties,
they must follow their rule including update new version of games evenwhen they think it’s
not necessary or it’s may harm their brand and revenue.
3.Outbound logistics:
- Garena integrates all PC games on their Garena Desktop Application. Users visit their website
to download Garena Desktop Application then using it to download their PCs games.
- To mobile games, users must download it from App store and CH plays.
Strength: The release and update of PC game is easy to control.
Weakness: The release and update of mobile games depends on third party control
4. Marketing and sales
- Garena sell all items in games.
Strength: easy to control
- Garena market their games through a combination of outdoor and print advertisements,
television commercials as well as social media platforms and other online forums. They also
market their games through our extensive network of cybercafé partners who have installed their
Gcafé management and billing system, or Gcafé system. They customize the user interface of
each computer in the cybercafé to prominently display their games
- Garena holds more than 5000 Esports tournaments per years and stream it on their channels.
- Garena provide membership for users including VIP system, birthday gift, rotation luck.
- Garena usually offer diverse discount promotion in their games. For example, in the first week
of April 2019, League of legend run 4 campains including April Fool event, Secret store, Limited
purchase and discounts on specific items in their normal store.
Strength: With a diverse marketing strategy, Garena quickly attracts a large number of players
and holds a large market share in Vietnam. All the esports tournaments with high price both in
game and in real life helps capture loyalty of their customers.
-> VNG do not have membership and their promotion in games are boringly repeated, usually
giving some special items for purchasing a large amount of in-game currencies.
5. Service
- Garena have more than 50 call centers to support users.
- They uses bọth in-game support system as well as other channels such as website, email,
fanpages and hotline for better experiences of gamers. Their in-game support system mainly use
to report non positive actions of others gamer. Their main support website has user- friendly
interface with some basic questions in 4 groups which are continuously updated to all their
events. Their fanpages on Facebook are used to update news and interact with their customers.
Their hotline serves from 6.30AM to 24 PM including weekends and holidays.
Strength: Diverse and highly differentiated support platforms. Garena service is much more
professional comparing to their rivals. For example, the hotline of VNG only works from 7AM
to 22PM and their support website also worse due to the bad design and useless functions.
Mục B
Airpay offer discount 5% if customers use it to purchase Garena in-game currencies. For
new user of Airpay, they can get 100 thousands VND if they purchase Garena in-game
currencies for the first time they use the app.
Gcafe is a channel for Garena to marketing their games as they defaultly set standby screen
settings of computers using Gcafe by images of their tournaments or their products.
=> Strength: Running marketing campaign through Gcafe and Airpay will reduce the cost
as they has the same mother company of Garena. In contrast, as Airpay is a new service,
these campaign also helps Airpay attract new customers who are playing Garena games.

Mục D
Other game of Garena are in the same genre with these games. For example, Heroes of
Newerth and League of Legends or Ring of Elysium and Free Fire. There is no differences
in way of playing so they somehow are competitors to their launches games. Hence, Garena
need to carefully research if they want to launch other products in Vietnam market as they
may damage their launched products.
In Vietnam market, Free fire and Arena of Valor rank 1st and 2rd respectively in top
games app by total revenue chart in 2018 while Fifa online 4 (mobile app) rank 3rd in top
football games app by total revenue. => STRENGTH
Note: các game khác của garena toàn là mua bản quyền, Garena thì lại đang định hướng tự
sản xuất game. Vậy nên nó đg ưu tiên push Free Fire í. N thấy tương lai nó cũng như thế
thôi.

Sources
https://www.seagroup.com/investor/home
https://viettimes.vn/cach-garena-vao-viet-nam-165532.html
http://vietnamesports.vn/
https://e27.co/factors-lead-success-garena-20160411/
Một số hình ảnh