MercadoLibre's Headline Numbers Had This One Thing in Common

The onset of the pandemic earlier this year caused a significant increase in the adoption of e-commerce. Those changes in consumer behavior weren't limited to the U.S., as evidenced by MercadoLibre's (MELI 2.48%) second-quarter results in its home of Latin America. Some investors believed this acceleration would fall off in the third quarter, but nothing could be further from the truth.

In this episode of Fool Live that aired on Nov. 4, "The Wrap" host Jason Hall and Fool.com contributor Danny Vena go over the most important metrics and pinpoint what the headline numbers all had in common.

Jason Hall: I think there's a lot of people that want to hear about MercadoLibre, ticker MELI. Danny, what do they say? What matters? What do you think's next?

Danny Vena: I want to point out going in, we have seen a number of tech stocks deliver earnings that were really just much more than what the market was expecting over the last week. Even in the face of blowout earnings, a lot of stocks have been falling. I just checked MercadoLibre in after hours trading, it was up two or three percent and that's after the earnings drop. So that will give you an idea of just what a blowout they actually delivered. I'm going to go straight to screen sharing here and we're going to pull-up MercadoLibre's earnings report here. I just wanted to focus on the first page of the earnings release here.

Vena: Okay. So MercadoLibre's net revenues of $1.12 billion, up 148 percent year-over-year in constant currency. The total payment volume, which represents the amount of money that was paid for products on their platform, $14.5 billion, up 161 percent, again, in local currencies. Gross merchandise volume, $5.9 billion, also up 117 percent. If you're starting to notice a theme here, up triple digits, up triple digits, up triple digits, and that is a theme that plays out through many of their headline metrics. I'm going to scroll down just a little bit here and go right to the business highlights. They almost doubled their unique active users, up 92 percent to 76 million gross merchandise volume, which we just talked about, $5.9 billion.

Now, you'll notice that it's [up] 62 percent in U.S. dollars, 117 percent in local currencies. For followers who don't really know how this works, MercadoLibre does not do any of its business in US dollars. Everything that it does is done in the local currencies of the countries where it does business. However, because it reports and is traded on a US [stock] exchange, it reports in dollars. So the amount versus US dollar changes quite a bit. So you will see me focusing on what it does in local currencies because that's much more representative of how the business is doing on the ground where they are.

The number of items sold up 110 percent year-over-year to 206 million. Their live listings, which is the number of products that were on their platform for people to buy, up about 22 percent. I'm going to scroll down here, total payment volume, which is the total amount of payments, we talked about this just a minute ago, up 92 percent to $14.5 billion.

Now, this metric rate here is a key one that I want to spend a minute on, off-platform TPV. Now, total payment volume is the total dollar amount of the payments that they have transacted, and in this case, off-platform is not the products that were sold on MercadoLibre's e-commerce site, but their payments business has branched out into other websites and also other brick-and-mortar stores. So that business has been growing like gangbusters up 196 percent year-over-year in local currencies. That business is really taking off. They've been setting the stage for that for years, and the move to e-commerce and the move to digital payments have really sent that business soaring. Now, there's another, let's see here. We're going to stop sharing for a minute so that I can change the screen that I am on here.

Hall: So good to see your pretty face for a moment there, Danny. I'll just have to say that.

Vena: Yes. Jason makes jokes about being my work spouse, and my wife says, "Should I be worried?" (Laughs).

Hall: Show her a picture, she'll know she won't.

Vena: All right. We're going to go back to another document here. So this is the investor shareholder letter that they show and I just wanted to show, if you look, I was talking about how it played out, 117 percent growth, 139 percent growth. This is for gross merchandise volume and the gross merchandise volume of the products that were shipped. Items sold up triple digits, net revenue up triple digits, total payment volume up triple digits. Every single metric that they listed on this page is up triple digits.