Latin American techs leaving commodities in the rearview mirror

In the first week of August, Argentinian online marketplace firm Mercado Libre became the most valuable company in Latin America, with its USD 60.6 billion market cap taking the crown from Brazilian miner Vale. That a tech-based company would be worth more than a firm based on extracting and producing commodities is a symbolic shift in the region, similar to what was seen in 2011 in the U.S., when Apple surpassed ExxonMobil for the first time.

Publicly traded on Nasdaq, Mercado Libre achieved excellent results in Q2 2020, with its shares appreciating 101.8 percent in value between April and June. E-commerce has experienced a significant uptick during the Covid-19 pandemic, with countries around the world closing their in-person economies during isolation measures. But this trend has influenced the tech sector as a whole, with a number of Brazilian firms seeing...