00:00It was a beat for you on many measures. There was particular growth when it comes to Brazil, when it comes to Mexico.
00:05Talk us through, though, some of the drivers from where you're sitting that led to these numbers.
00:11Hi, thank you for having me. Pleasure of being here.
00:14Yes, we are very excited about the results that we saw this quarter.
00:18I think the main driver continues to be the investments that we're making on our platform to continue to ring people online.
00:24Again, remember, keep in mind that commerce, penetration of e-commerce in Latin America continues to be very low.
00:30So it's a large opportunity to continue to ring people online.
00:33And the same thing we could say about fintech, where millions of people in the region have not been financially included by the traditional banks.
00:41And this particular quarter, we saw very strong results in e-commerce in Brazil,
00:45where we made a very big investment last quarter by lowering the free shipping threshold from 79 reais to 19 reais.
00:54Just to put it in perspective, those are about three and a half dollars.
00:58And that was a big investment, but we've seen the results.
01:01You know, the number of items that we sell on the platform accelerated significantly from 26 percent growth last quarter to 42 percent this quarter.
01:10So very excited about results throughout the year.
01:12Well, Martin, on that point, though, I mean, are you concerned at all?
01:16I understand the top line growth that that brings.
01:20Are you concerned about the impact on profitability on margins after having lowered that threshold?
01:27This is a great question.
01:28This is something that we discuss with our shareholders, in particular those that have a long term perspective.
01:33When you see the growth opportunities that we have ahead of us in Latin America,
01:37the most important thing for us is not to miss those opportunities.
01:40And that requires investments.
01:42I mean, this quarter we grew by 39 percent year on year, our top line.
01:47This is the 27th consecutive quarter in which we grow our top line by more than 30 percent.
01:53There's no other company, no other public company in the world that has delivered that.
01:57And the reason why we do that is because we don't focus on short term margins.
02:01We look at long term value creation.
02:03So we invest behind our ecosystem.
02:05This particular quarter, we invested in Brazil and we have seen the results.
02:10We're also investing in the credit card, in the fintech part of our ecosystem.
02:14That's also giving us positive results.
02:16So I think we manage for long term value creation.
02:19As I mentioned before, in the short term, some of these investments might put a little pressure on margin.
02:24But we're confident, and we have done it in the past, that this will drive growth.
02:29And the long term perspectives for margins should improve as we scale and as these investments mature.
02:35Well, Martin, one of the investments that you are making, of course, is AI as well to improve search.
02:41You said recently that the transition will be more of a continuity than a change for us
02:45when it comes to sort of seeing the impact that AI has on your business.
02:49So I was hoping that you could give us some more examples of what exactly that means.
02:54Sure.
02:55We have been investing in AI or developing AI or implementing AI throughout our ecosystem for many years
03:02to help us with fraud prevention, with credit scoring, with search.
03:07Sorry, the light went off here.
03:09And more recently, obviously, CX is an area where we have improved significantly the way we interact with our users.
03:17We have been able to sustain the growth that we have sustained with the same number of people because we implemented AI.
03:25We are using AI to make more productive the 20,000 developers that are working on developing our platform.
03:33We recently launched a Genetic AI both on our commerce and our fintech platform.
03:39On fintech, you have an advisor that helps you with some of the tasks that you have, you know, scheduling, sending money to making payments
03:49or getting money out of your account, those type of things, and gives you advice on how to interact with our platform.
03:55On the commerce side, we have a seller assistant where, you know, we have a million sellers operating on our platform
04:02that gives them advice on how to operate with us and create videos, for instance, to list the products on our platform.
04:09So a lot of different fronts.
04:10I would summarize it as some of them are cost-saving, and some of them improves the user experience with MercadoLibre and MercadoPago.
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