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MercadoLibre, the leading ecommerce provider in Brazil, is quickly evolving as a payments and fintech company. Their payments product MercadoPAgo is following in the footsteps of PayPal and Alipay - with more payments now "off platform" than through their marketplace.
And that’s reminding some analysts of how PayPal, which was originally purchased by EBay in 2002 and used as its payments service, wound up being more valuable than its parent company, analysts at both Susquehanna and BTIG noted in separate reports. PayPal separated from EBay in 2015 to concentrate on expanding its electronic transactions business without being shackled to the slow-growing online marketplace. "We remind investors that PayPal, once just a piece of eBay, is now worth 3 times more than its former parent," BTIG’s Marvin Fong wrote in a note.
