MercadoLibre Just Did What No Company Ever Has: 28 Consecutive Quarters of 30%+ Revenue Growth

On The Investor’s Podcast (formerly known as We Study Billionaires), investor Daniel Mahncke made a claim worth stopping on: MercadoLibre has achieved “the longest ever streak of quarters with over 30% year over year revenue growth to 28 consecutive quarters. And at Meli’s size, that’s an insane number. And Meli’s actually the only company ever to achieve that.” The market’s response? It sold the stock. That tension between a historically unprecedented growth streak and a falling share price creates opportunity for investors who understand what they’re actually looking at.

The Record That the Market Ignored

MercadoLibre (NASDAQ: MELI | MELI Price Prediction) posted Q4 2025 revenue of $8.76 billion, up 44.6% year-over-year, beating the consensus estimate of $8.49 billion. That result extended a streak that the company’s own Q3 2025 earnings summary described as “27 consecutive quarters of growth above 30% year-over-year,” with Q4 making it 28. No public company of comparable scale has done this.

Yet the stock fell. From the Q3 2025 earnings filing date through late April 2026, MELI dropped roughly 19%. The culprit in most investor commentary was margin compression. Management acknowledged that strategic investments created a 5- to 6-percentage-point headwind on operating margins in Q4, and net income fell 12.52% year-over-year to $559 million.

Mahncke argues that the market is misreading this entirely, and the evidence supports him.

Amazon Did This First. The Market Hated It Then, Too.

Clay Finck drew the comparison directly to Amazon’s history, citing Nick Sleep’s observation that investors were essentially telling Amazon, “Your gross spending has no value” despite 20%+ revenue growth. Finck noted that “this quote is spot on for Meli as well.”

The parallel is structural. Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) spent years reporting thin or negative net income while reinvesting every dollar into logistics, AWS, and Prime. Investors who focused on earnings per share rather than revenue trajectory and reinvestment logic missed one of the great compounding stories in market history. Amazon’s stock is up over 705% in the past ten years.

MercadoLibre’s investments follow the same logic. The four areas of deliberate investment in Q4 were: extending free shipping in Brazil down to items priced from R$19, scaling cross-border trade with a new fulfillment center in China, expanding first-party operations that exceeded $4 billion in FX-neutral GMV for the full year, and aggressively growing the credit card business. These are not margin mistakes. They are market-share purchases in a region where the runway is enormous.

The Runway Is the Story

E-commerce penetration in Latin America sits at just 14% to 15%, compared to roughly 25% in the US and over 30% in China and the UK. MercadoLibre holds less than 5% of the region’s total retail market, with physical stores still accounting for roughly 85% of retail spend. The financial inclusion angle compounds this: less than 20% of Mexicans and only 40% of Argentines have a credit card, which is why MercadoLibre’s fintech arm, Mercado Pago, matters so much. The credit portfolio grew 90% year-over-year to $12.5 billion, and fintech monthly active users reached 78 million, up 28% year-over-year.

Mahncke emphasized that Meli is “the only competitor of size that is basically South America first,” meaning, unlike Amazon or Sea Limited, Meli has “pretty much no alternative” but to invest through downturns in the region. That commitment is a competitive moat, not a weakness.

What Investors Should Actually Evaluate

The revenue growth rate shows no sign of slowing, and the margin compression is deliberate and temporary. Brazil revenue grew 48% year-over-year, and Mexico grew 56% in Q4, with advertising revenue expanding 67% in FX-neutral terms. This is a business still in early-stage expansion.

Compare that to Amazon, which posted full-year 2025 revenue growth of about 12% on a base of $716.9 billion. MercadoLibre is growing at roughly three times that rate from a much smaller base in a market that is structurally earlier in its development cycle.

The investor who focuses on MELI’s EPS misses, spanning three consecutive quarters in 2025, is looking at the wrong scoreboard. Management is deliberately trading near-term earnings for long-term positioning. The same trade, made by Amazon over a decade, produced generational returns. Whether MercadoLibre executes as well is the real question, and 28 consecutive quarters of 30%+ revenue growth is the strongest available evidence that so far, it is.