MercadoLibre Earnings: Fantastic Growth

MercadoLibre (MELI -0.45%) is having a good year. Booming sales trends are holding up in Latin America despite big shifts in consumer mobility.

In this video clip from "Beat & Raise," recorded on Nov. 5, Fool.com contributors Brian Withers and Demitri Kalogeropoulos discuss the highlights from the company's latest earnings report, along with some reasons why the stock still looks attractive.

Brian Withers: You going to talk one of my favorite companies today, MercadoLibre.

Demitri Kalogeropoulos: That's right, MercadoLibre. Yeah, let me share my screen here.

Withers: They had a good quarter, right?

Kalogeropoulos: They had a pretty good quarter. This e-commerce thing has legs as we've mentioned before. Let's see if that's going to load, there we go. Yeah.

MELI is their ticker symbol, they reported yesterday after the earnings, after the market closed and just the big takeaway is just a broadly fantastic quarter.

Sales were $1.9 billion, up 73%, which is about what Wall Street expected, but the big thing to remember there is that we're talking, this is on top of one of their biggest quarters in post early phase of the pandemic and sales a year-ago were up a 148%, so 73% on top of that 150% spike is just super impressive, broad-based growth.

The biggest markets, we're all doing really well. All the engagement numbers look good. The company was, they've got more FinTech products out, good uptake in their credit, and just lots of gains in buyers and sellers, and you can see there that the earnings were a lot higher than expected.

Part of that was because profitability inched higher and that was kind of a surprise, I think, because MercadoLibre is dealing with a lot of the same supply chain issues that a lot of these big global companies are dealing with and spending a lot more cash on the supply chain and on reducing shipping times and developing their platform and despite all that, profitability increased and that's one of the big benefits of having that top-line growth so quickly and also getting into those payment processing transactions are kind of helping those margins as well.

As far as the outlook, that looks really good because like I said the engagement metrics are just so strong across a lot of the platform.

Customer satisfaction is good. Buyers are happy that sellers are really engaged with the shopping service and they're really growing their credit portfolio and all that points to a really good holiday season ahead, despite the fact that there's going to be some short-term earnings pressure, management talked about in the call there.

They've got some growth initiatives that they're going to be spending a lot of cash on, but I think that makes a lot of sense in this environment.

Withers: Yeah, I look at the stock chart. We had a member comment yesterday that MercadoLibre has been dead money for the past year, and essentially, that's what you're seeing, this is since the beginning of the year, it's down 0.43% and it's still off its high, about 19%. So if you think about MercadoLibre as the key player in Latin America, it's at an $81 billion market cap right now. It's my second biggest holding behind Shopify. I just love this company right here at this point.

Kalogeropoulos: If you zoom out a little bit, that three-year chart looks much better and the five-year chart is just amazing. I think it's over 900% in that time. In the short term, it's might look a little boring, but this is a fast-growing company.

Brian Withers: Yeah, I love your comment at the beginning, this e-commerce thing has legs. That's priceless.