You'll have to scroll a bit to find Marcos Galperin, but he's definitely on the list.
Not in the top 10 with Tesla (TSLA) Elon Musk, or amazon (AMZN) Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg, the executive director of the metaplatforms of the facebook parent company (GOAL) .
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But keep going. You'll find it.
Galperin is currently ranked 374th in the Bloomberg Billionaires Indexwith a total net worth of $7.05 billion.
He is just below Ruan Xueping, vice president of Gongniu Group, the Chinese civil electrical products company, just above Canadian billionaire JK Irving, and 60 points below former President Donald Trump.
What is Galperin doing here? He is co-founder, president and CEO of the e-commerce platform MercadoLibre. (MELI) known by many as the amazon of Latin America.
In 2021 interview With 20VC, Galperin said the idea for MercadoLibre – the name means “free market” – emerged during the dotcom boom in 1998.
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The CEO sees risks and opportunities
“Those were the days of Crazy.com, and I was doing my MBA at Stanford and having a lot of discussions with friends about the possibilities that the Internet would bring to Latin America,” he said, adding that “I was also venting frustrations because there really weren't many applications.” running on the Internet in Latin America.”
Back then, Galperin said he had to “really roll up my sleeves and do things myself because otherwise they wouldn't get done.”
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The hard work clearly paid off as MercadoLibre, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, has nearly 60,000 employees and a market capitalization of $83.3 billion.
The company operates in 18 Latin American countries, including its home country, Argentina, and Brazil. In 2003, MercadoLibre created Mercado Pago, its online payment tool.
“I don't think my relationship with risk has changed much,” Galperin said. “I still think we face enormous risks and enormous opportunities because we are still creating markets that are in the early stages in both e-commerce and fintech. I think we are just scratching the surface.”
MercadoLibre hosts the largest online commerce and payments ecosystem in Latin America and in 2023, the company had around 218 million unique active users, up 47% from the previous year.
That was the same year that Time included MercadoLibre on the list of the 100 most influential companies in the world.
On Thursday, MercadoLibre reported first-quarter earnings of $6.78 per share, up from a profit of $3.97 per share a year ago, beating the FactSet consensus of $6.10 per share.
Revenue totaled $4.3 billion, compared with $3.04 billion a year ago, beating FactSet's forecast of $3.84 billion in sales.
CFO cites 'solid results'
The total volume of payments handled by Mercado Libre's fintech arm increased 35% to $40.7 billion during the quarter.
“I am pleased to report another quarter of strong results with excellent operational and financial performance in Brazil and Mexico,” Chief Financial Officer Martín de los Santos told analysts during the company's press conference. earnings call.
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Net income grew faster than operating income, as lower foreign exchange losses in Argentina were partially offset by lower operating income in that country, he said.
The country's president, Javier Milei, devalued the Argentine peso last year and cut state spending to reverse a deep fiscal deficit.
“Overall, we are very satisfied with the performance of the business in the first quarter despite the headwinds from Argentina,” he said. “And this is a great way to kick off MercadoLibre's 25th anniversary.”
Richard Cathcart, director of investor relations at MercadoLibre, said e-commerce in Latin America “is far from mature and financial services are ripe for disruption.”
“We are the leading e-commerce platform in the region, which has significant growth potential from new shoppers and increased frequency as retail engagement and penetration increases,” he said.
Cathcart said MercadoLibre is building one of the largest retail media platforms in the region, “leveraging our extensive first-party data to offer advertisers unique audience segmentation capabilities and a comprehensive full-funnel strategy.”
Wedbush analyst Scott Devitt, who has a $1,800 price target on MercadoLibre shares, reiterated his outperform rating on the stock.
“We are impressed by the strong results in Mexico and Brazil, which offset declines in Argentina,” Devitt said. “Over time, we continue to see a clear path to higher take rate and profit margin driven by growing compliance adoption, advertising growth and scale.”
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