MELI
Mercado Libre, Inc
stock NASDAQ

I understand the strategic rationale for building a lending business to strengthen their ecosystem. What I struggle with is the decision to aggressively scale a naturally riskier business like lending in a geographic region where economic stability is lower and more volatile than, for example, in the U.S.
That said, they clearly have a strong strategic reason for doing so: in a predominantly cash-based economy like Latin America, offering credit is an important way to deepen and strengthen their ecosystem.
My question is simply: what happens if economic conditions deteriorate? What if unemployment rises, consumers become less able to repay their loans, and interest rates increase further? That is certainly not an unlikely scenario in these markets. How well is MELI actually positioned to manage its credit risk, particularly with its loan book currently growing at such a rapid pace? And by how much could provisions potentially have to increase?

Depends on the underlying price. I sell spreads on MELI and naked on AMZN for example.

GOOG, MELI, MSFT, AMZN, RDDT, META.

Unfortunately, MELI is not a publicly traded company registered directly with the CVM as a domestic issuer. You can find its filling with the SEC.

I don’t see my favourite Brazilian company - MELI

MELI adapts the Amazon playbook, but without the Chinese competition nearby compared to SEA. If I had to chose, I‘d always prefer MELI.

When I first bought MELI in 2017, they had \~5,000 employees. They have over 125,000 employees just 9 years later. That's a 47% headcount CAGR. Revenue in that time is a 49% CAGR lmao

I think MELI cutting their free shipping rate was like Amazon introducing Prime and free delivery for a cheap annual subscription of like $49 or something. Go back and read analysts reports and how the market market reacted to it - they chopped the stock price by like 20-25%. What happened? In the short term they cut margins and massively increased volume. Overtime that volume pushed them to build scale and efficiencies that no one could match. MELI is literally following the exact same playbook.
The reduced margins is an investment in volume and the investment in that volume is a massive acceleration of the build out of logistics to meet that volume. As that logistics gets built up, margins will come back up in the long term - and MELI will be in an almost unassailable position by then.

This is why I have been trimming MELI at a loss during the past few weeks.
I am now much less confident that MELI's ecommerce take rate will ever recover to their historical numbers. 
And if it won't recover meaningfully, that's thesis-breaking.

I guess shoppee may be more compete with PDD (Temu) than MELI

"MELI's shipping is unbeatable though, they are everywhere, very fast, efficient and cheap"
As an European I am just curious how they deliver to customers sitting along Amazonas river which can only be reached by boats. Does Meli have own boats - which probably would not be very efficient?
Or do they use the weekly regular delivering - which would not be very fast? Or another way?

Doesn't have to be a zero-sum game.
Brazil is a massive market that's still considerably behind the US, China, and pretty much the entirety of the west in terms of Ecommerce adoption. They are both growing at breakneck speeds, and will for the foreseeable future.
It's also worth noting that Shopee is growing from a smaller revenue base than MELI. Most estimates land at roughly 25% of SE's revenue coming from Brazil, where about half of MELI's does. Not taking anything away from SE by saying that, what they've done in Brazil is incredibly impressive.
I own big positions in both. The markets each operates in are so underdeveloped compared to the sheer amount of money that moves around in their economies. They are both relentless problem solvers, battle-tested through multiple tough macro backdrops, and operate in business lines where the strong kind of naturally get stronger over time.

I'm Brazilian, MELI is way too strong here and I would bet agaisn't them. Shopee (SEA) imports a lot of stuff and recently the government removed an import tax (which they created themselves) and that may have boosted sales. The current government also favours Chinese companies a lot.
MELI's shipping is unbeatable though, they are everywhere, very fast, efficient and cheap

MELI's Q2 revenue in Brazil accelerated to +39% YoY vs last year's +29%.
It was also mentioned that Brazilian users transacted more frequently (+19% YoY), so really nothing here that showed signs of market share loss.
Keep monitoring MELI and Sea's e-commerce market growth and avg. user's purchase frequency QoQ and YoY. If MELI's growth decelerates while Sea sees acceleration, then we could conclude that there is share erosion.

During Sea's Q2 2026 earnings call last week, it was mentioned that they are growing faster than their competitors in Brazil, taking a shot at MELI and hinting that they are winning the competition.

Since 53%-55% of MELI's revenue is coming from Brazil, is anyone worried about them losing market share impacting their sales growth over the next few years? I understand that a lot of the growth is net new people that have never used e-commerce before, but still wanted to bring it up since so much of MELI's revenue growth is concentrated in Brazil.

Also know that MELI reduced their free shipping threshold in Brazil recently and made significant investments in their Brazil logistics last year.

$MELI $MU AND an index fund

MELI pumping

That MELI dip yesterday