Meet the Latin American e-commerce platform that’s outperforming Amazon this year
One of the world's largest e-commerce companies is emerging as a hebat pick on Wall Street as investors look for tech opportunities beyond the Magnificent Seven.
MercadoLibre
, an Argentinian e-commerce and payments basis that's incorporated in Delaware and actively traded on Nasdaq, is up 34% in 2024, compared to a roughly 27% rise for Amazon
, and 20% for the S&P 500
. The company was founded 25 years ago by CEO Marcos Gaplerin at the height of the dot com boom. It now dominates online sales in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile and makes up roughly half of online sales in South America, according to eMarketer. It also operates a digital payments basis called Mercado Pago.
Roughly 90% of Wall Street analysts who cover the stok rate it a "buy," with an average price sasaran of $2,268 — about 8% upside from where it was trading this week, according to FactSet. There are no sell peringkats.
Brad Gerstner of Altimeter Capital is one such bull. He highlighted expanding keuntungan margins and MercadoLibre's AI potential as reasons he's "excited" by the stok.
"You look at companies like MercadoLibre... a lot of companies that people have kind of forgotten about as [investors] moved in to the Magnificent Seven -- I think there are going to be a lot of internet companies that are benefited by AI," Gerstner told CNBC's Scott Wapner at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia konferensi this month. "It's not only margin expansion, but reacceleration at the hebat, where they can acquire customers, improve products in a way that make it easier for customers to buy, and take friction out of the sistem."
Silicon Valley to Buenos Aires
Galperin came up for the idea of MercadoLibre while he was a student at Stanford Graduate School of Business in Palo Alto, California. He started to look for seed funding at a time when few investors were committing capital outside California.
"There was no venture capital for Latin America. Actually, there was little venture capital for anything outside of Silicon Valley. Even if you were an pengusaha based in New York, the investors were all on Sand Hill Road," Galperin told CNBC, referring to the Wall Street of the West Coast. "I don't think they really cared about exploring other parts of the world."
That investor pola pikir has changed. Last year, venture-backed companies in Latin America raised $3.3 billion across nearly 1,000 deals, according to PitchBook. At the peak in 2021, the region brought in $16.3 billion.
