Mercado Libre founder vows US$75-million investment as he hosts Milei

Mercado Libre founder Macros Galperín hosted President Javier Milei at his ecommerce giant’s offices in Buenos Aires on Wednesday, welcoming him with news of a US$75-million investment in a new logistics centre.

Billionaire tech entrepreneur Galperín, 52, announced the Argentine online marketplace and financial services firm would construct a new logistics centre in La Matanza, Buenos Aires Province.

The new warehousing centre will be inaugurated by the end of 2025 and will generate 2,300 direct jobs, according to the company, which expects to process 200,000 products per day in the 56,000 square metres of the new plant.

According to Galperín, the investment will double the firm’s storage capacity, improve product processing, and reduce delivery times “to the millions of users of the platform” in Argentina.

“We are thinking not three or six months from now, but ten years from now. There are sectors where e-commerce has grown strongly, as in the case of technology, but not in other areas, such as supermarkets,” said Mercado Libre’s president.

Milei, 53, was full of praise for Galperín as he visited Mercado Libre’s offices in Saavedra, Buenos Aires City, images of which were later shared on social media.

Mercado Libre is “an example of the Argentina we want and of innovation and the strength we Argentines have,” Milei said in a speech to a hundred of the company's employees.

“Thanks to entrepreneurs like you and your tireless efforts every day, our country will move forward,” said the President, addressing Galperín directly.

Milei, who has slowed runaway inflation in Argentina but seen the economy enter recession as a result, claimed that “more than US$50 billion in investments” were in the pipeline for Argentina.

“During the last 100 years, Argentina has been punished by governments that misunderstood the relationship between the state and the private sector,” said Milei, describing Galperín as a “social benefactor.”

The tech billionaire, who founded Mercado Libre as a start-up in 1999 and turned it into a tech unicorn, is a strong enthusiast of Milei's ultra-liberal economic policies.

Milei's orchestrated visit and endorsement comes a week after Galperín's company, which operates the Mercado Pago payment platform, denounced 36 banks in Argentina for “cartelisation and coordinated practices aimed at harming the fintech industry.”

Mercado Libre argues that Mercado Pago’s main competitor, the Modo virtual wallet, violates competition law in Argentina because it “never notified or requested authorisation from the CNDC (National Commission for the Defence of Competition) to operate jointly.”

Modo, which is backed by more than 30 banks that operate in Argentina, filed a complaint back in May denouncing Mercado Libre before the CNDC for anti-competitive practices.

At that time, the banks alleged that “Mercado Libre's abusive conduct” generated “negative effects for the market, disproportionately maximising its profits at the expense of reducing the supply of value for users due to the lack of competition.”

Mercado Libre is the most valuable company in Latin America, with a market capitalisation of US$102 billion as of September.

The company, which has 60,000 employees, began as a platform for buying and selling products and then developed financial services such as Mercado Pago, which is extremely popular in Argentina and Uruguay, among other nations.

– TIMES/PERFIL/AFP