12 Best Consumer Cyclical Stocks to Buy According to Analysts

2. MercadoLibre, Inc. (NASDAQ:MELI)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 109

Average Upside Potential as of November 28: 37.43%

MercadoLibre, Inc. (NASDAQ:MELI) is a Uruguayan eCommerce firm. It is one of the largest firms of its kind in Latin America and boasts 94 million unique buyers on its platform.

As of November 28th, 18 out of the 26 analyst recommendations for MercadoLibre, Inc. (NASDAQ:MELI)’s shares were a Buy. Out of the remaining eight, five were a Strong Buy while three were a Hold. The average analyst share price target for MercadoLibre, Inc. (NASDAQ:MELI) is $2,847.

One recent analyst coverage for MercadoLibre, Inc. (NASDAQ:MELI)’s shares came on November 24th. It saw UBS maintain a Buy rating for the stock but cut the share price target to $2,900 from $3,000. The firm had previously reiterated a $3,000 price target for MercadoLibre, Inc. (NASDAQ:MELI) on October 22nd and set the $3,000 target on June 2nd. As part of its October coverage, the bank had pointed towards the firm’s upcoming third-quarter results to determine whether it was able to maintain robust margins and growth amidst rising competition. The price target had been raised to $3,000 following MercadoLibre, Inc. (NASDAQ:MELI)’s first-quarter earnings.

MercadoLibre, Inc. (NASDAQ:MELI)’s third-quarter earnings saw its $421 million net income miss analyst estimates of $481 million. During the call, when XP’s Pedro Caravina asked management about OpenAI’s move into eCommerce, here is what CEO Ariel Szarfsztejn said:

“So before jumping into OpenAI, let me say that we are extremely excited about the potential of agentic AI to enhance discovery, service and productivity within our ecosystem. There are several examples of things that we are doing on that regard. We just launched our own seller assistant, which is a conversational tool that gives sellers personalized advice and recommendations on how to manage data activity in our platform. In fintech, as you probably know, we just launched our first AI assistant that can help our users with a wide range of tasks like making or scheduling money transfer through a conversational platform, asking for questions on the user’s operation and so on. But this is the first step of many to come for Mercado Pago and for MercadoLibre.

I think to the specifics of your question, the key message there is that we need to continue to focus ourselves in building the best agentic experience within our platform, and that will give us optionality on what to do next and how to move forward. I think it’s early to make comments on OpenAI and their partnership with Etsy, Shopify, and so on. We need to understand how this will develop in the long run, what role agentic AI will play in the relationship with consumers. And eventually, decide if there’s something different that we need to do for sure. We need to put the technology in place in order to have an agentic experience in MercadoLibre and in Mercado Pago in the near term.”