You’ll have to scroll a little bit to find Marcos Galperin, but he’s definitely on the list.
He’s not up there in the top 10 with Tesla’s (TSLA) Elon Musk, or Amazon’s (AMZN) Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook parent’s Meta Platforms (META) .
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But keep going. You’ll find him.
Galperin is currently 374 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with a total net worth of $7.05 billion.
He’s just below Ruan Xueping, vice chairman at Gongniu Group, the Chinese civil electrical products company, right above Canadian billionaire J.K. Irving, and 60 notches down from former President Donald Trump.
What’s Galperin doing here? He is the co-founder, president, and CEO of the e-commerce platform MercadoLibre (MELI) , known to many as the Amazon of Latin America.
In a 2021 interview with 20VC, Galperin said the idea for MercadoLibre- the name means “free market”- emerged during the dot-com boom in 1998.
Analyst reacts to MercadoLibre first-quarter results.
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CEO sees risks and opportunities
“It was the crazy.com days, and I was doing my MBA at Stanford and having lots of discussions with friends regarding the possibilities that the Internet would bring to Latin America,” he said, adding that he 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 my sleeves up and do things myself because otherwise things were not getting done.”
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The hard work clearly paid off as MercadoLibre, which is marking 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 think that my relationship with risk hasn’t changed that much,” Galperin said. “I still think that we are facing huge risks/huge opportunities because we are still creating markets that are in the very, very, early stages both in e-commerce, and in fintech. I think we’re just scratching the surface.”
MercadoLibre hosts the largest online commerce and payments ecosystem in Latin America and in 2023, the company had about 218 million unique active users, up 47% from a year earlier.
That was the same year that Time included MercadoLibre in 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, surpassing the FactSet consensus of $6.10 per share.
Revenue totaled $4.3 billion, compared with $3.04 billion a year ago, beating FactSet’s call for $3.84 billion in sales.
CFO cites ‘solid results’
The total volume of payments handled by Mercado Libre’s fintech arm climbed 35% to $40.7 billion for the quarter.
“I’m pleased to report another quarter of solid results with excellent operational and financial performance in Brazil and Mexico,” Chief Financial Officer Martin de los Santos told analysts during the company’s earnings call.
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Net income grew faster than income from operations as lower FX losses in Argentina were partially offset by lower operational income in that country, he said.
The country’s President Javier Milei devalued the Argentine peso last year and slashed state spending to reverse a deep fiscal deficit.
“Overall, we are very pleased with the performance of the business in Q1 despite the headwind from Argentina,” he said. “And this is a great way to kick off MercadoLibre’s 25th anniversary.”
Richard Cathcart, MercadoLibre’s investor relations officer, said that e-commerce in Latin America “is far from mature, and financial services are right for disruption.”
“We are the leading e-commerce platform in the region, which has significant potential for growth from new buyers and higher frequency as engagement and penetration of retail rise,” he said.
Cathcart said that MercadoLibre is building one of the largest retail media platforms in the region, “which leverages our extensive first-party data to offer advertisers unique audience targeting capabilities and complete 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 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 rising fulfillment adoption, advertising growth, and scale.”
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