A few weeks ago, Mercado Libre revealed the results of its operation, corresponding to the fourth quarter of 2018.
In this regard, Pedro Arnt, Chief Financial Officer of Mercado Libre, commented, “I am very pleased to report another year of solid performance, through the company’s key business units. A year where we developed and began to scale our own logistics network, which will allow us to offer better service levels at lower costs, both in Mexico and Brazil. In addition, we successfully launched our digital wallet and QR payments initiatives in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico”.
Below, we share his word, in first person.
Outstanding business and financial results: year end 2018
We sold a total of 334.7 million articles through mercadolibre.com during the course of the year, which resulted in a volume of money transacted through the platform equivalent to 12,504.9 million dollars. The resulting year-on-year growth in terms of items sold was 23.9% through mercadolibre.com during the course of the year, which became a volume of money transacted through the platform equivalent to.
The resulting inter-annual growth in terms of items sold was one. We reached a register of users that reached 267.4 million at the end of the year. For its part, the product offering within our platform amounted to 182.1 million items listed at the end of the year.
A million of dollars
The amount of money transacted through Mercado Pago during the year was a total of 18,455.9 million dollars, thanks to a volume of payment transactions that reached 389.3 million movements, thanks to a volume of movements. Mercado Envíos registered an increase of 47.1% compared to the previous year, this in consequence of the 221.7 million articles delivered in 2018.
Efficency: the real key
Around 50% of the products were delivered in 3 days or less, since the business unit managed to reduce shipping time by 30% year-on-year compared to the previous year, this in consequence of the. Around one, since the business unit achieved year by year. Our revenues as a company presented an increase of 18% more than in 2017, reaching a total of 1439.7 million dollars.
The net loss was 36.6 million dollars, mainly due to the changes in the structure of shipping costs in Brazil, the elimination of low price products on the platform and the initiatives related to free shipping.
Our Fintech segment: sustained growth
One of the great novelties at the end of the year was presented in our Fintech segment (by Financial Technology): the credit and loan service as part of Mercado Libre through Mercado Crédito and Mercado Pago was successfully implemented. In addition, we were able to continue developing other innovative online payment solutions beyond the e-commerce platform.
A great provider of integral fintech solutions
Partly thanks to an accelerated penetration of the different online-offline products, we managed to get Mercado Pago to position itself as the great provider of integral financial technology solutions. The highlight is that we were able to bring these solutions closer to sectors of the population of Latin America that have historically been marginalized from traditional financial systems, whose operations, consequently, have tended to operate in the informal economy of the region.
Finally, as a result of all the above, the volume of money processed by Mercado Pago (outside our Mercado Libre platform) exceeded for the first time the milestone of 2 billion dollars, achieving in fact 2.1 million dollars during the fourth quarter of the year 2018.
Also published on Medium.