Topic: How To Invest

Q: Pat, what is your opinion of MercadoLibre (MELI)? Thanks for all your great advice.

Article Excerpt

A: MercadoLibre Inc. (ADR), $1,180.95, symbol MELI on Nasdaq (Shares outstanding: 50.5 billion; Market cap: $56.1 billion; www.mercadolibre.com), hosts online commerce and payments platforms in Latin America. Based on its unique visitors and page views, the company is a market leader in e-commerce in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Peru, Mexico, Venezuela and Uruguay. MercadoLibre’s services are designed to provide its users with mechanisms to buy, sell, pay for, and collect on e-commerce transactions. It offers those e-commerce services through its MercadoLibre Marketplace, MercadoLibre Classifieds, MercadoPago payments, MercadoClics advertising program, MercadoShops webstores, and MercadoEnvios shipping services. The company’s shares have dropped about 30% since mid-November 2021. That’s after MercadoLibre announced it had raised $1.55 billion in a discounted share-price offering. The shares were priced at $1,550.00 each, which was 5.1% below the then-closing price of $1,633.21. The one-million-share offering represented 2.0% of the company’s shares outstanding. The sale came after MercadoLibre’s stock had already dropped from almost $2,000 a share in…