Harding Loevner: “We Took Advantage to Acquire Shares of MercadoLibre”

Harding Loevner, an investment management firm, published its “Global Equity Fund” fourth quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A net return of 4.35% was recorded by the fund for the fourth quarter of 2021, trailing its Benchmarks, the MSCI All Country World Index, and the MSCI World Index which returned 6.77% and 7.86% respectively for the same period. Spare some time to check the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a clue about their top bets for 2022.

Harding Loevner Global Equity Fund, in its Q4 2021 investor letter, mentioned MercadoLibre, Inc. (NASDAQ: MELI) and discussed its stance on the firm. MercadoLibre, Inc. is a Buenos Aires, Argentina-based online marketplace company with a $56.6 billion market capitalization. MELI delivered a -16.60% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are down by -26.41%. The stock closed at $1,124.52 per share on March 01, 2022.

Here is what Harding Loevner Global Equity Fund has to say about MercadoLibre, Inc. in its Q4 2021 investor letter:

“When many highly priced securities weakened in December, we took advantage to acquire shares of MercadoLibre. Established in 1999, MercadoLibre is Latin America’s largest e-commerce and payments platform, operating in 18 countries but skewed primarily to the region’s three largest economies, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. Approximately two-thirds of the company’s revenues come from its e-commerce marketplace, where the average fee it charges on transactions by third-part sellers (its “take rate”) has expanded sharply from 6.4% in 2014 to over 16.0% in the third quarter of 2021. MercadoLibre is growing rapidly: the gross merchandise value (GMV) traded across its commerce platform reached US$20.9 billion in 2020, vs. US$12.5 billion just two years earlier.”

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Our calculations show that MercadoLibre, Inc. (NASDAQ: MELI) failed to obtain a mark on our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. MELI was in 74 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the fourth quarter of 2021, compared to 68 funds in the previous quarter. MercadoLibre, Inc. (NASDAQ: MELI) delivered a 1.84% return in the past 3 months.

In December 2021, we also shared another hedge fund’s views on MELI in another article. You can find other letters from hedge funds and prominent investors on our hedge fund investor letters 2021 Q4 page.

Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.