Hello, everyone, and welcome to the MercadoLibre Earnings Conference Call for the Quarter Ended June 30, 2020. I am Federico Sandler, Investor Relations Officer for MercadoLibre, our Senior Manager. Presenting today is Pedro Arndt, Chief Financial Officer. Additionally, Oswaldo Jimenez, CEO of Mercado Pago will be available during today's Q and A session. I remind you that management may make forward looking statements relating to such matters as continued growth prospects for the company, industry trends and product and technology initiatives.
These statements are based on currently available information and on current assumptions, expectations and projections about future events. While we believe that our assumptions, expectations and projections are reasonably in view of the currently available information, you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward looking statements. Our actual results may differ materially from those discussed in this call for a variety of reasons, including those described in the forward looking statements and risk factors sections of our 10 ks for our year ended December 31, 2019, Item 1A, Risk Factors, in Part 2 of our Form 10 Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2020, and on any of Macaldolibre Inc. Other applicable filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which are available on our Investor Relations website. Finally, I would like to remind you that during the course of this conference call, we may discuss some non GAAP measures.
A reconciliation of those measures to the nearest comparable GAAP measures can be found in our Q2 2020 earnings press release available in our Investor Relations Web Now let me turn the call over to
to Perro. Hello, everyone, and welcome to our Q2 2020 earnings conference call. Before we begin, I want to take a moment to highlight that our thoughts and well wishes continue to go out to all the individuals and families affected by COVID-nineteen, both at our company and everywhere. We particularly extend our immense gratitude for and appreciation and recognition to all those brave souls who continue to work on the front lines through this unprecedented global health crisis. As you may have seen, our latest branding campaign, Elbow to Elbow, which promotes social distancing, is one of the ways we are contributing to awareness around prevention, raising funds for treatment efforts and paying tribute to healthcare professionals.
I'll detail our other contributions in a moment. We also want to take this opportunity to thank all of MercadoLibre's employees who have shown endless amounts of resiliency, effort, sense of purpose and courage, whether it be balancing the requirements of family, household and work responsibilities, while conforming to social distancing norms and working from home or showing up to work at our warehouses and service centers every day, enabling us to deliver the goods that our users need. We are all immensely proud of all the hard work our employees are doing during such trying times. Before I dive into the quarterly performance overview, let me share with you some of the efforts we continue to undertake in response to this pandemic. We have kept remote work for all the teams except for our logistics personnel for which we have applied the strictest norms of prevention and hygiene in all our logistics centers, Added temporarily to our payroll employees from Le Pen Cotillard in Argentina, while in July we signed agreements with the master franchisees of brands such as McDonald's and Starbucks.
In this manner and together with the agreement that we have already implemented with LPQ, we will total 3.50 contracts under this collaborative labor initiative in Argentina. We are working towards extending this offer throughout Latin America. We have continued to manage the operation of our commerce, shipping and FinTech solutions without significant interruptions throughout the quarter, helping new and existing sellers to continue their operations as well as buyers to get their products on time. We have launched comprehensive support and training platforms for thousands of SMEs and entrepreneurs in the region, facilitating the onboarding of merchants that are starting to operate in the world of online commerce for the first time, as well as generating alliances with some of the main e commerce platforms that operate in this segment. We continue to strengthen our presence and our offering in the long tail and mid tail segments by enabling merchants to process food aid cards in Argentina and Brazil, already representing 10% of our MPOS TPV in Argentina and allowing for more than 40,000 new merchants to accept these emergency payments.
We have promoted our payments link to avoid crowds of people at physical points of sale, while also allowing small and medium sized businesses to continue to operate. We improved the product experience and enhanced the communication, positioning the PaymentLink as an excellent solution for distant sales in the current context without needing to have an e commerce site. And finally, we continued with our donation campaigns helping NGOs and food banks in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Peru and Uruguay through the elbow to elbow challenge and campaigns. With that said, let's recap our performance during the quarter, starting with our e commerce business. E commerce surged during the Q2 as we reached new milestones in penetration and experienced powerful tailwinds, which drove solid performance and overall execution across the board.
Traffic and buyers accelerated strongly versus the Q1 with an unprecedented increase in engagement rates. Sessions grew by 48% year on year, an acceleration of 28 percentage points versus last quarter's growth. We also improved our conversion rates with buyers on our marketplace surpassing the $30,000,000 mark, reaching $31,500,000 during the quarter. Engagement rate in terms of frequency of purchase increased from 4.3 items per unique buyer last year to 5.7, representing more than a 30% improvement annually on a consolidated basis. And new buyers attained a record growth of 75% year on year.
Consolidated gross merchandise volume doubled over last year, growing at 102% during the quarter with all countries accelerating sequentially on an FX neutral basis. On a country level, all of our countries accelerated from the Q1 as we delivered FX neutral year on year growth rates of 230% for Argentina, 58% for Brazil and 122% for Mexico. Colombia and Chile's combined growth was almost 200% year over year. We've become more focused on these 2nd end markets given their increasingly attractive growth profiles as the business accelerates in scale. Our Other segment grew 69% year on year on an FX neutral basis.
Furthermore, underlying the strength of the quarter, units sold growth exited the quarter growing above 100% year on year in all of Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile and Colombia. At the category level, consumer electronics, which was once one of the most affected verticals at the beginning of the year, started recovering during May June to complement the sound growth rates in categories more directly related to COVID driven consumer behavior changes such as CPG and health to name a few. Regarding consumer electronics in Brazil, where we have been doing significant work to improve price competitiveness assortment amongst other initiatives. In this country, we exited the quarter with an almost 40% growth acceleration throughout the period, indicating that many of our efforts are beginning to pay off. In consumer packaged goods specifically, not only have we continued to see improvements in terms of adoption and growth, but we are also continuing to verticalize the experience in this increasingly important category for us.
On the product side, during the month of April, we launched our supermarket navigation in Brazil and Argentina, helping us accelerate conversions and growth in that category. In line with that, we also continued enhancing the navigation experience through our shopping cart as we enabled users to bundle items in a single order and be able to access free shipping benefits on this category as well. We have also made solid progress on our cross border trade initiatives to deepen assortment and selection during the quarter, especially in Mexico. Our improved output was primarily driven by our Chinese sellers being able to recover from the initial impact of COVID-nineteen to their businesses. Additionally, during the second quarter, we launched pricing per category in Mexico and Chile.
This had already been made available in Colombia since the Q1, where we lowered commissions for consumer electronics categories and increased them for higher margin merchant categories like fashion and apparel, as well as furniture among others. This initiative allowed us to better adapt pricing to our merchants' margin structures and be more competitive without compromising overall monetization and take rates. I'll now turn to logistics, a growth area that continues to unlock powerful synergies with our marketplaces. Our managed network has been central to growing our e commerce businesses and being able to handle the increased demand resulting from the pandemic, validating the resources we have been allocating to the growth of our own logistics network over the previous years. We are delivering on time and cost efficiently across the region with our consolidated net promoter score continuing to improve.
In fact, our managed network NPS reached an all time high in Brazil with users highlighting speed of delivery and merchants quality of our shipping services. We've also been able to maintain delivery speed while growing volume, particularly for deliveries arriving in less than 48 hours, where year over year we improved by 10 percentage points the consolidated share of these rapid deliveries, especially in Brazil, where that improvement was of 13 percentage points. Same day deliveries also improved on a consolidated sequential basis with countries such as Brazil more than doubling from prior year quarter share, mainly attributable to a higher penetration of our Flex service, which already accounts for 5% of the consolidated volume. Important milestones in MercadoEnvios did not stop there. Our managed network penetration surpassed the 50% mark on a consolidated basis.
Brazil and Argentina reached 51% 79%, respectively. Fulfillment in Brazil reached 17% of total shipments, exiting the quarter with a penetration of nearly 20% in June. The remaining 30 points of the Brazilian managed network coming from our rapidly expanding cross docking operations. In Mexico, we maintain the pace of execution with fulfillment penetration stable on a sequential basis. On the shipping product and technology front, we are pleased to report that MELI Logistics, our integration of micro carriers into our managed network gained penetration in Brazil and Mexico.
We also launched technology for this product in Argentina during the quarter, enabling us to more efficiently manage the pandemic driven surge in demand we have faced. As a result of this integration and as our Flex Logistics solution continues to gain share, we continue to generate efficiencies in our shipping costs with savings Q on Q of around 23% per unit shipped. Given the success of our managed network, we've continued scaling this important initiative with the launch of our first fulfillment centers in Chile and Colombia, as we double down on our efforts to maintain our leadership position in these countries. Additionally, we also continued with the expansion and rollout of our Flex Logistics solution, launching it in Uruguay and Chile during the quarter. The latter should not only help us drive greater penetration of Mercado and Vios in the aforementioned countries, but also enable us to have more influence over the last mile delivery, being able to generate efficiencies on the most cumbersome part of the shipping journey.
Additionally, we continued expanding places, our drop off point solution in Brazil. We now have over 1,300 places drop off points throughout 4 states. During the pandemic, given that some of our drop offs weren't marked as non essential activities and weren't able to open, we implemented an alternative places offering, MELI branded place trucks. This initiative was deployed in safe, high density locations in Sao Paulo, providing an innovative experience to sellers at a reduced cost. With that, now let's move on to the FinTech side of the business, another critical building block of our ecosystemic strategy.
Our off platform payments business exceeded our expectations during the period due to the strong performance of our online payments business and the relative resiliency demonstrated by our physical in store solutions, MPOS and QR. Consequently, MercadoPago surpassed the 52,000,000 payers mark during the quarter, growing 64% year on year, accelerating sequentially by more than 21 percentage points. We've also seen better engagement rates with our payment solution achieving almost 8 transactions per quarter per unique payer. During the quarter, off platform total payment volume accelerated sequentially to 175% year on year on an FX neutral basis with a stellar 3 39% year on year growth in Argentina, a strong performance in Mexico and in the other segments, which are growing over 2 20%. Brazil, on the other hand, has a greater off platform total payment volume contribution from mobile POS systems, which rely on foot traffic, which given the aforementioned lockdowns was a more compromised segment than online payments.
The impact of the pandemic on the MPOS business translated into a slower off platform TPV growth pace in Brazil of 84% year on year. During the Q2, our online payments processing business, what we call merchant services delivered 1 of the highest historical growth rates reaching 164% year on year on an FX neutral basis. The latest shift towards e commerce consumption benefited us across all regions. Notably, we recorded year on year growth of 4 57% in Colombia and 258% in Argentina, both on an FX neutral basis. Not only did our online services accelerate on both number and volume processed, but also on the onboarding of new merchants adopting our payments offerings.
This has accelerated the migration of sellers to the online world, both large and long tail, leading to a record acquisition during the 2nd quarter. Mobile Wallet also had a strong quarter as it benefited from a consumer shift to contactless payments. Although we did observe a deceleration in the in store payment solutions like our QR and MPOS products. The latter 2 continued to be affected by lower foot traffic due to COVID-nineteen throughout the quarter. As a result, consolidated wallet TPV accelerated to 3 73% year on year on an FX neutral basis.
Overall wallet adoption reached 9,500,000 active payers during the quarter with almost 10 transactions per quarter per unique payer, accelerating the frequency of purchase versus prior quarters. 2nd quarter MPOS TPV grew on a consolidated FX neutral basis by 80% year on year. This performance was impacted more negatively during April with year on year growth of 71%, but accelerated through May June, exiting the quarter at a growth rate of 89% year on year, almost reaching pre COVID levels. Additionally, in Argentina, we are happy to report that we launched our Point Plus device, which should enable us to move up the merchant base and have a more complete value proposition that facilitates better cross selling to marketplace merchants who also have physical stores. Although, as I just mentioned, the pandemic negatively impacted MPOS merchant base increased during the Q2 to 3,000,000 dollars while on a consolidated basis, device sales surpassed the previous quarter mark reaching almost 1,000,000 devices sold.
This strong momentum of device sales and user base growth is mostly due to the trend towards digital payments, cash shortages and an increased propensity towards local purchases in smaller convenience stores. We also implemented different initiatives to accelerate the transactional volume, including but not limited to lowering fees, eliminating interest charges on credits, cross selling the payments link and enabling the feature of acceptance of emergency aid as a means of payment. Staying on FinTech, one quick update on our PayPal commercial agreement. We are very pleased to announce that PayPal is now available for cross border transactions on MercadoLibre in Brazil and Mexico and also available as a payment option within MercadoPago's online checkout for foreign shoppers. This is a first step that we hope will generate powerful synergies between both companies and boost even further our common objective to democratize payments throughout Latin America.
Moving on to Mercado Credito. During the quarter, we slowed our pace of originations in order to manage our exposure to merchant and consumer credit risk as the pandemic and lockdowns got stronger at the beginning of the quarter. We've been able to mitigate default rate impact due to the swift preventer measures taken. Consequently, non performing loans actually improved Q on Q on a consolidated basis. This was in large part explained by the slowdown in the pace of originations during April that I just mentioned as our teams shifted origination towards users with good historical credit behavior, while we also enhanced our collection mechanisms and processes.
Along these lines, it's also important to highlight that as we entered into May June and we had more data in our models, we gained a better, more confident understanding of users, which enabled us to more accurately predict their behavior and also to ramp up originations again. When we analyze the non performing loans through the Q2 on a monthly basis, they have kept improving all the way through the end of June. The lower debt levels plus higher interest rates have resulted in an improvement in the profitability of our credits business during the Q2. Let me now move on to the review of our financial progress report for the quarter. The financial performance we delivered during the Q2 has been stellar.
However, I do want to take a moment to highlight 2 things before I walk you through the actual results. First, I want to acknowledge an event that took place during the quarter, which resulted in a bad debt charge of $27,000,000 Within MercadoPago, we traditionally have agreements with multiple unaffiliated entities under which our users are able to deposit cash at the agencies of these entities for credit to their MercadoPago accounts. These amounts are recognized on our balance sheet as receivables from these unaffiliated entities. During the month of June, we became aware that one of the unaffiliated entities we work with in Argentina that acted as a cash collection agent had accumulated a number of receivables that they did not settle to our bank accounts. Upon review, we realized that collection efforts for these balances had not been carried out and that the aging of these accounts receivables exceeded the allowed limits established by our internal controls.
As a result, we've booked the charge to our P and L to reflect that the collections are past due our aging policies, while we continue to work to recover the amount from the counterpart. We've also identified this event as an opportunity to improve our internal controls on this specific matter in order to avoid a similar situation occurring in the future. We've also revised all other accounts and have found no evidence of similar deficiencies in collections efforts with other entities that form part of our payments value chain. 2nd, and to state the obvious, this has been a unique quarter. Changes in consumer demand brought about by the pandemic have accelerated adoption of digital platforms significantly throughout the region.
We believe this has both the enduring impact of greater scale benefits in general to our financials as well as the short term benefit of allowing us to significantly decrease marketing spend while still benefiting from accelerating organic traffic. As we see it, that first trend is sustainable. The second one less so as we plan to re ramp up sales and marketing investments in our business to acquire and retain the growing number of users that have moved online during the last few months. With those two comments out of the way, let me start my review of our P and L with comment on consolidated net revenues. For the Q2, they ascended to $878,400,000 a year on year increase of 61% in U.
S. Currencies and 123% on an FX neutral basis. As we continue to optimize shipping subsidies and costs that minimize contra revenues from free shipping programs and benefit from the surge in demand throughout our platforms. Gross profit for the 2nd quarter was $427,200,000 at a margin of 49% compared to 50% during the Q2 of 2019. The margin compression resulted primarily from an increase in shipping operating costs as a percentage of net revenues, partially offset by a decrease in collection fees as a percentage of revenues.
Sequentially, we've improved gross margins by 66 basis points, mostly driven by better margins on the shipping warehousing front and efficiencies both in shipping carrier costs, MPOS purchase of devices and collection fees. In the slides accompanying this presentation, we've included as we do every quarter a detailed breakdown of these as well as the OpEx margin evolution that I'll cover quickly now. Operating expenses increased to $327,700,000 an increase of 15% year on year in dollars. As a percentage of revenues, operating expenses were 37% compared to 52% during the Q2 of 2019. The $43,100,000 decrease is mainly due to marketing expenditure decreases that were made possible as a result of the extraordinary growth in organic demand brought about by the effects of the COVID-nineteen pandemic on consumer behavior.
This was partially offset by $25,500,000 increase in bad debt expenses explained by the recognition of a $27,000,000 charge from the aforementioned accumulated accounts receivables from an unaffiliated entity in Argentina, an increase of $14,500,000 in our Buyer Protection Program expenses, mainly in Mexico and Argentina a $2,300,000 increase in charge backs from credit cards due to the increase in our MercadoPago transaction volume, a $1,600,000 increase in other sales expenses mainly related to marketing initiatives and a $1,500,000 increase in salaries and wages. Additionally, we had a one time charge in the valuation methodology of how we account for our long term retention plan of $15,300,000 As a result, operating income was $99,400,000 compared to a loss of $29,700,000 during the prior quarter. As a percentage of revenues, operating income margin was 11.3%, improving by 1587 basis points on a sequential basis. Excluding the bad debt one time charge, operating income would have been $126,100,000 representing a margin of 14.4%. Moving down our P and L, the company incurred $27,000,000 in financial expenses for this quarter, mainly attributable to financial loans entered into during the Q2 of 2020, mainly in Brazil and Argentina and interest expenses from our trusts related to our factoring business in Argentina and the 20 28 convertible notes we have issued.
Interest income was $18,800,000 a 44% decrease year over year as a result of lower interest rates in our investment as a consequence of the pandemic. As a result of this, net income for the 2nd quarter ascended to $55,900,000 Before wrapping up, I want to recognize this delicate moment in history, one that has taken a toll on all of us in health, wealth and spirit. At MercadoLibre, our stated business mission is to democratize commerce and payments. With so many businesses being hard hit, we have the unique opportunity to connect and empower millions of Latin American entrepreneurs, while continuing to partner with governments across the region in our role as an essential service. Never has our mission been more relevant and never have we felt more determined to fulfill it.
We will continue to do our part to help get the world back on its feet. And once we get there, we hope to celebrate that achievement with all of you, elbow to elbow. Thank you, everyone, as always for joining the conference call, and we look forward to keeping you updated on our progress report next quarter. With that, we can take your questions.
Our first question comes from Stephen Ju with Credit Suisse.
Okay. Thank you. So Pedro, can you talk about the changes to the fee structure that is now expanding out of Colombia? Presumably, this should result in greater listing selection and hopefully purchase velocity, but we wanted to confirm that you are indeed seeing this pickup, although it might be difficult to disaggregate the impact versus the pandemic's impact. Also, when do you anticipate rolling out the fee structure changes to Brazil?
Thank you.
Hi, Stephen. Thanks. So the fee structure aims, as you anticipate, to better match the fees we charge merchants with the economics of different categories and therefore should drive more merchants to want to list. We're trying to accomplish this in a way that is take rate neutral. So we're not trying to raise take rates nor diminish them.
And you are correct, disaggregating impact from the overall context is extremely difficult. I think the one assertion we can make is that the balancing of take rate has worked well in the markets where we've done this. And obviously, our marketplaces are on fire across the board. So we anticipate and we are working on the rollout to Brazil. We haven't communicated a specific date yet, I believe, But this is something that given the positive impact in the other countries, we are looking to roll it out to the other markets.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Irma Scharf from Goldman Sachs.
Yes. Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking my question. Congrats on the quarter. In the monetization of e commerce, e commerce revenues, the commerce GMV, you had some impressive results.
I know there's a couple of different forces at play and you mentioned in your opening remarks the impact of reduced optimized free shipping subsidies and control revenues. But could you just maybe touch upon with a little bit more color on what were the main drivers here and how you maybe see that progressing into if there's anything sort of one off that you that we may not be seeing into the back half of the year? Thank you. Irma, sorry, I'm not sure
I understood the first part of the question.
It's about the monetization rate or the implied take rate of the commerce revenues over the GMV, which improved year over year and quarter over quarter by an impressive amount. And I wanted to understand you had to sort of separate the different impacts from I think there's probably also to some extent some accounting effects as some of the revenues or some of the shipping costs are shifting to different lines. But how should we think about this into the back half of the year in 2021?
So I think what you're seeing now probably already begins to reflect a more stabilized level in terms of representation of where the revenues are presented. And in terms of free shipping, I think we're analyzing going forward where there are opportunities to increase free shipping. But given that there also have been significant improvements, as we called out, in cost of shipping and whatnot, we actually see pockets of opportunities to offer more free shipping without negatively affecting monetization. So I think the quarter should be a reasonable indication of where the year could play out in terms of the monetization level on the marketplace. The other issue Irma that drives the deltas in monetization on a consolidated basis is if you look at the growth rates, we are seeing tremendous performance out of Colombia, Chile, even Mexico continues to drive phenomenal growth.
Brazil rebounded significantly, but when you compare growth rates to these other markets, it's lower. So our mix shift is moving to some of these newer markets with big opportunity and they typically have lower monetization levels on the commerce side as they are earlier stage.
Perfect. Thank you very much.
Our next question comes from Bob Ford, Bank of America.
Hey, good morning, everybody, and congratulations Pedro, I wanted to ask a few questions, if that's okay. Can you talk a little bit about adoption rates at QR and A points of CLO with CLO, Lynx and your other Brazilian partners and how you expect that to ramp? And also, how are you thinking about remittances and the adoption of the digital solution given the very high cash orientation of the market today? And then you've made tremendous progress with respect to the managed network, particularly in Brazil. Can you talk a little bit about the possible impact in the event of another Correio strike in Brazil and how you can mitigate that given the greater integration?
Hi, Bob. This is Rosaldo. With regards to adoption of QR codes in Brazil, what we saw in general not only in Brazil, but general during the Q2 was that due to diminished food traffic in the case of wallet, we saw an acceleration in those flows which do not require people to be in person. So we saw acceleration in P2P payments, in mobile in top up of mobile phones and also in payments of utilities. In terms of QR code, given that there was a significant decrease in traffic and that some of the categories where we have been stronger are related to food or gas station, what we did was we reduced the number of incentives and discounts we were providing.
With regard to your specific questions of how do we expect the ramp ups with Cielo and Lynx. So far, we have seen some transactions there, but it's difficult to discern quite the effect given this reduction in overall traffic and lower use of in store payments during the quarter. If I'm not sure I got your second question right, was it related to remittances, right?
It was and given the cash orientation of the market today, how do you plan to change that behavior pattern? I would expect that the certainly the fees and the foreign exchange spreads have to be much more competitive with your value proposition?
Yes. And with regard to our businesses, we have been doing more business development and partnering with other companies to become stronger here. As you know, part of the agreement we have with PayPal is that we will leverage their Zoom platform and we are already working on together managing remittances from the U. S. Into Mexico.
They have a huge distribution of people who could fund those accounts in the U. S. And they would be able to pay to our account holders in Mexico. Beyond that, we have also started working with Western Union and providing them with the ability also to both fund and dispose placement. It's not live yet, but we have announced it already.
You can already fund transactions using Mercado Payo, but you will also be able to disburse transactions using
Mercado Payo.
Great. On the managed network, just to quickly level set. So the managed network has been our build out of our own logistics network over the past few years, where we control transportation, cross docking and fulfillment. Within the managed network, there is an operation we call MELI Logistics, which further, has driven the success we've had in terms of managing the surge in demand over the past few months, which is where we begin to rely less and less on large transportation companies and are able to rely on smaller middle mile, last mile and first mile operators. The consequence of all this is that our overall reliance on Correios has continued to diminish month on month and Q on Q.
So if you look at the rumblings of a Correios potential strike, I think we anticipate it to not be very long or severe. We believe that Correos will try to maintain level of operation as well as possible. We are in constant communications with them. But most importantly, we are much more able today to shift volume away from Correios. We are not entirely unreliant on them, but we are incredibly better equipped than in all the previous strikes we've had to face as a consequence of everything that we've been building on the logistics front, which is really, really one of the highlights of our execution over the past few months quarters.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Andrew Rubin with Morgan Stanley.
Hi, thanks very much for the question. So wondering if you could please talk some more about some of the assortment initiatives. First, you mentioned CPG and supermarket. Just curious how meaningful these categories are now and how you're viewing the pace of rollout? And then second, on the 1st party assortment, any similar color there on your targets for 1P within the mix?
Thanks very much. Sure. So consumer practical goods, of which supermarket is a sub initiative, is a category that has been obviously surging throughout the COVID period, but it still represents mid single to high single digits for us in the most successful markets, with tremendous upside and opportunity as we begin to focus more and more on it. Our first party initiatives are still smaller than that. They're probably in the lower single digits.
But again, also a lot of building blocks that we have put in place over the last few quarters, and we feel we are increasingly better equipped to be able to accelerate investments and execution behind 1P to complement inventory gaps or to drive greater price competitiveness of our 3P efforts. And I would say that the a significant pickup in inbound interest and in pipeline of brands and merchants working with us to onboard into our marketplace. So that has also been another area where because of all the building blocks that we've put in place over the last few years, we feel we can be of assistance to many merchants, large brands, OEMs as well that weren't working with us in the past and can start working now or for merchants who are already working with us to be able to double down on their marketplace efforts. Great. Those building blocks make sense.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Robbie Jain with HSBC.
Hi, good morning. A couple of quick ones from my end. In terms of the investment priorities, what do you see as maybe more strengthened or accelerated for 2020 now? And maybe what is something which is slightly delayed, both maybe on the marketplace and the FinTech end? And the second one is on specifically on FinTech.
I mean, you announced a partnership with HBO recently. Should we expect in the future to have multiple streaming partners or services that you would kind of work with? And what are the features could you kind of give us some color on that you're planning for the loyalty program? And do you expect that there will be a strong marketing campaign around the loyalty program at some point? Thank you.
Great. Hi, Ravi. So with the risk of being repetitive, but I think this is important, our strategy and our investment cycle by and large remains unchanged. If we were scrambling now to try to react to the opportunities arising because of COVID, I don't think we could be as successful as we're being. This is a consequence of work in logistics and category expansion and overall user experience that obviously we've been highly focused on over many years now.
Fortune comes to those that are prepared. So at the margins, I would say, we have accelerated even further the rollout of our own logistics network because that has been key throughout this period. And it's been tremendously encouraging to see how well the logistics operation has been able to deploy an even greater number of nodes in our own networks at an accelerating pace successfully. Obviously, from a category perspective, we have redirected resources and focus potentially away from some slower categories over the next few quarters like apparel or auto parts to some of the faster growing ones like CPG, supermarket, health and beauty. But again, this is not a change in strategy, it's marginal reallocations of capital.
On the FinTech side, I would say there is an increased focus on the overall digital account as we see greater digital adoption and a somewhat slower adoption of certain in store QR categories, primarily in restaurants and food. So there's a bit of a shift there. We still see restaurants, foods and other in store QR categories and MPOS as tremendous opportunities long and midterm. So I would say this is more of a pause before we start reaccelerating. And we've already began to see that when you look at our comments on MPOS in Brazil and other markets as we compare the exiting of the quarter to the beginning of the quarter.
The final point I would say is we have also, as a consequence of this, seen and been able to work with governments in helping them distribute a lot of the aid that is being distributed throughout Latin America, particularly in Brazil, that has generated a ramp up in users receiving account balances as a consequence of these aid services and fundings by governments. And so that's also driven the focus I mentioned previously on digital accounts. On your second question, we do intend and the strategy is to be able to work with leading entertainment and content companies in ways that are accretive to their objectives of customer acquisition and billing and charging of those customers throughout Latin America, given the capabilities that Mercado Pago has, while simultaneously being able to generate value for our users within the loyalty program from discounts and special benefits and promotions that we are able to negotiate with these partners. So the idea is to generate a sort of a subscription hub for our users with benefits, while at the same time driving incremental customer acquisition of digitally savvy and high frequency users and also help these partners with the challenges in billing, charging and credit that exist throughout the region and that we've solved very efficiently with Mercado Palo.
But content is only one of the prongs behind the loyalty program. Free shipping obviously was the initial one that's been incredibly successful. But our idea is to continue to overlay other benefits as we partner with more and more companies in the region that want access to our growing user base of loyal users and are willing to give benefits and discounts to those users in order to acquire them.
That's helpful. Thank you, Benoit.
Our next question comes from Gustavo Oliver with UBS.
Hello, Pedro. Hello, Federico. Good morning, everyone. I have two questions. The first one, Pedro, maybe a bit repetitive, but do you foresee any logistics bottleneck in your entire system with acceleration of Grover?
We are very comfortable with the pace of the investments that you're making. And if you could highlight where you see more critical volumes and capacity to drive? And the second question, the question is related to the payment link. You mentioned in your opening remarks that you are promoting more the payment link as a feature tool to help like reduce in store agglomerations, etcetera. But do you foresee a long term opportunity here of both engagement and monetization, if possible?
Great. So let me take the first one and Rosvaldo can take the second one. We are extremely focused on continuing to generate incremental capacity in our logistics networks, and we are investing significantly behind that. We have already communicated incremental warehouses for Brazil. We have recently launched a new warehouse in Chile.
We will be doing so in Colombia and very, very rapidly building out what I mentioned before, which is Mercado Libre Logistics, which allows us to access capacity from small companies, independent truck drivers and whatnot. So our expectation is that we can continue to generate that incremental capacity as our volumes grow. So far so good. It's an ongoing process. It's challenging.
But most importantly, we believe that it generates an enormous competitive advantage because what we are building is truly unique. And if you look at service levels of that logistics part of our overall network throughout the COVID crisis, they have been extremely good, while at the same time driving down prices. So this is a strong competitive advantage as we build it out.
With regards to the Payment Link, technology we have for many, many years, but it has clearly accelerated as a consequence of COVID. Part of what has happened is many individuals and small businesses, which in the past did not sell online or could always be able to collect in person, we're not able to do so. And so they had started to sell online and probably through very basic means probably sometimes sharing the payments link through WhatsApp or other social media and or even deliveries where they are able to collect online and this has seen a significant acceleration. We see this as an opportunity to engage those small merchants and help them move along and start doing more e commerce in general. And we see that the monetization is pretty healthy, because usually these are merchants in the very long tail.
So we do not need to offer any discounts on our fees. So monetization is very good. With regards to the long term opportunity, we believe we saw it mostly as an entry point into e commerce for these individuals and small merchants.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Edward Yruma with KeyBanc Capital Markets.
Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. Two quick ones for me. First, thank you for the commentary on marketing. I guess at what point do you believe that you'll have to relayer in marketing again?
Will this occur in the Q3? And second, given some of the favorable quarter on quarter trends in MercadoCredit, though, are you expanding now at this stage credit issuance? Thank you.
Sure. So very quickly without guiding, which we don't, we have began to once again invest behind customer acquisition and even more so brand building. This is a unique opportunity with tremendous fast forward in digital adoption by consumers throughout the region. And so this is not a time to focus on marketing efficiencies. We believe the scale benefits from the business will still be there, but certainly we want to be aggressive and to capture the opportunity.
So we have already began to spend more on marketing. Q2 really was anomalous in that marketing spend. We cut back entirely as we try to understood what was going on and the organic demand was still there. We've now began to take the learnings from all that and to selectively deploy capital in both sales and marketing again. It should still be efficient, but yes, we are already spending.
And Ed, with regards to MercadoCredit, initially in the Q2, we were cautious because we wanted to make to see how each merchant and each consumer was doing. But we as you were saying, we are expanding the offering, the credit issuers. In fact, our credit offering is already above pre COVID levels.
Great. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Deepak Mathai with Barclays.
Great. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Pedro, I realize that you don't want to provide guidance, but can you provide some additional color on what you're seeing in July August on the e commerce and FinTech business? Obviously, these are volatile times, but it seems like e commerce has stayed strong through July in many markets.
But can you talk about what you're seeing? And then the second question on MPOS, you mentioned that it's close to pre COVID levels already. What type of businesses are driving the recovery at this time? And can you talk a little bit about how much of the merchants that you had in 2019 are likely lost permanently in this business? Thank you.
So I think very quickly, we mentioned in the prepared remarks that we exited the quarter and entered the July period across most markets in a stronger fashion than we did in the beginning of the quarter, which was already, quite strong as a consequence of consumers moving online. But I think there's still a lot that we need to wait and see what happens on a macro level. So we will give you an update when we report the next quarter. But certainly, we have gone from strength to strength.
With regards to MPOS, as we mentioned in the prepared remarks, we did see an acceleration in the number of active merchants. We have 3,000,000 active merchants. And this, I would say, is related to two facts. On the one hand, we as people prefer to stay away from cash, we have seen an increased demand of devices. And for the first time, we sold about 1,000,000 devices in the quarter.
What type of merchants? It's mostly it's more merchants. Nonetheless, we have been able to move up the merchant base both we're starting to move up the merchant base both in Argentina and Brazil. We launched in the prior quarter, we have launched the MPOS Pro in Brazil and we launched an MPOS Plus in Argentina, which are added to this higher merchant base. And something else worth mentioning, and I'd say it varies a little category, it varies a little bit on a country by country basis.
In Argentina, it's more we're seeing more small supermarkets and mom and pop stores using our MPOSs. And in Brazil, it's mostly smaller individuals and merchants. Additionally, a driver behind increasing volumes in the quarter has been government aid both in Argentina and Brazil, which is disbursed through bank accounts or special cards. And these are we have been able to launch the possibility to accept these cards both in Argentina and Brazil, and this has driven debit card volume in both countries.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Jamie Friedman with Susquehanna.
Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. I'll just ask the 2 upfront. So it sounds like as we've seen elsewhere, the Payments business is clearly benefiting from the e commerce business. I was wondering if you would say the opposite is true.
Is the e commerce business also benefiting from the payments business? Maybe you could reference some examples, because it seemed like there was a big boost in MercadoPago net new actives or accounts on file and their usage? So that's the first question. And then let's see. About this CPG mix, we recognize it's a great opportunity and it seems like you've monetized that opportunity.
But where are we in that journey? When do you see it like being more material than just mid to high single digits? Thank you.
So let me take a stab at both and Oswaldo can complement. Clearly, we have a unique platform approach to our business, where we combine commerce and payments in as synergistic a fashion as we can. So all these users that are onboarding the digital wallet and coming into payments eventually through the loyalty program, through cross sell, but I would say the loyalty program is the big bet there. We should be able to convert those to commerce users as well. I would characterize that one as more opportunity than actually immediately happening because a lot of these users will first come on to the payments wallet, begin to use the systems and then we have to with time be able to cross sell to them.
On the CPG mix, I think there is still a lot to come. We will continue to expand our CPG offering in our supermarket offering. We will continue to invest in the technology and the front ends to make purchases more verticalized within those categories. We will combine this with more and more 1P mix. So I would say this is in the very early innings.
It's gotten to mid to high single digits faster than we thought because of COVID, but there is still a lot to grow. And when we look at share of wallet and overall consumer spend in the region, this is obviously one of the very big categories that we still under index. So I think the upside there is quite significant as we continue to build user experiences around that category.
The only thing I would add is that we are already seeing, as you mentioned, both Mercado Power uses through transactions on MercadoLibre and vice versa. For the quarter, we had in total 52,000,000 payers. And if we were to look at each of the verticals, 31,000,000 were on platform, €30,000,000 off platform. So there was €9,000,000 overlapped people doing both on and off platform transactions during the quarter. And what we're seeing is increased number of transactions payments per quarter and we believe this extra visibility will result in extra driving in both verticals.
Thank you, Pedro. Thank you, Oswaldo.
Our next question comes from Marvin Fong with BTIG.
Great. Thank you very much for taking the time to answer my question. 2, just one quick one on the new commission structure in certain countries. Could you just help us understand if we should just assume that the overall take rate will stay consistent with prior history or would it move one way or the other up or down as a result of the changes? And then second one, press for Osvaldo, the new PIX initiative that should be coming into play in Brazil starting November.
Just curious what your thoughts on that are? Do you see it as a major catalyst for new user adoption of digital wallets in general? Thank you.
So on the changes in take rates, again, just to level set, we are rising take rates on categories where merchants typically have higher margins and we are lowering take rates in categories where merchants typically have lower margins and we are trying to accomplish this in a take rate neutral fashion. Consolidated take rate for MELI should continue to consistently grow as consumers and merchants adopt more and more of our services and we're able to better monetize our user base from this incremental adoption of services. But the specific marketplace pricing, we are trying to carry this out in a take rate neutral fashion. We've been successful in doing that in Colombia and so far in Mexico and Chile likewise, but it is a moving target.
And with regard to peaks, we are very excited with the initiative. We believe we have lots of effects, but we want to speak about 1 in each of the online and offline. Online, we are excited mostly because up until now it was very difficult to accept debit cards in Brazil. So most of the e commerce was done only with credit card. And we believe that fixed will enable millions and millions of users who did not have either a credit card or did not have a balance in the credit card to do more transactions online.
And then with regards to offline, we believe that it will drive acceleration of acceptance of QR codes in Brazil. And I think that there will be we are preparing to work there in increasing the number of stores and our sales force to reach out to these stores. We believe that QR in PIX combined with the ability to process credit card transactions, which we already had, will also enable to accelerate the deployment of QR code payments in the country. So we are working on that.
Great. Thank you, both very much.
Appreciate it.
Our next question comes from Marcelo Santos from JPMorgan.
Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask about your long term strategy for logistics, especially in Brazil, where we see some of your marketplace competitors operating some sort of omni channel using their network of stores as advanced inventory locations. Do you think this could create a disadvantage in the long term? Do you think they would be able to provide quicker deliveries given that they would have the inventory close to consumer?
And what's your view on that?
Let's see. 1st of all, I think we have always said that we believe that long term as consumers get more demanding as they do in developed markets, home delivery beats pickups. So our approach is to build out the number of FCs we have to get inventory closer to consumers, but continue to deliver to your doorstep, not have you have to drive to the retail location to get the product, which at the end of the day is the same thing as an offline purchase. To your doorstep also allows us to get things to you quicker. Having said that, we also have initiatives that look to replicate some of those elements of having a physical store footprint.
So we are rapidly growing our pickup and drop off points throughout most of our network to be able to have greater nodes for merchants to drop things off, which would be the equivalent of what some competitors could try to do with the stores. But clearly, our network design does not try to turn a physical store, which we don't have into a highly optimized e commerce, fulfillment center or cross docking or service center, but rather we focus entirely on building out capabilities to get things to your doorstep faster and cheaper than anyone else.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Our next question comes from Kunal Madhukar with Deutsche Bank.
Hi, thanks for taking the question. I wanted to understand the competitive landscape, not only within online, but also with offline in terms of you just mentioned competitors using their stores as fulfillment centers or as part of the logistics network. So what do you see in terms of them kind of going more and more online in Brazil as well as in Mexico?
Thank you.
So look, I think we really continue to focus on our users and building out our capabilities. If we do that, I think history has shown that we are in a unique position because of periods of time and to be the market leader in this rapidly expanding space. So really our focus is how do we continue to execute the way we have been executing, continue to launch innovative products, get into more categories. And that is how we believe we will build competitive advantages and continue to be successful in the competitive scenario. Obviously, the region is competitive.
Consumers sorry, competitors also have their initiatives, but we stay focused on ourselves and our consumers. We trust that we will continue to lead and gain share as this market expands.
Thank you. Our next question comes from John Polanyi with Jefferies.
Thanks for taking my question. It sounds like you made a lot of progress in supermarket and CPG during the quarter. Can you discuss what initiatives you have in place to help retain CPG sellers once the pandemic is over? Also, can you talk about any key changes in purchasing frequency and retention that you've observed in other categories that you directly attribute to the expansion of your CPG offerings? Thank you.
Thanks. Great questions. So there is a lot of work on front ends and product initiatives. We've launched our supermarket navigation in more markets now. We've continued to try to optimize pricing for CPG, eliminating flat fees and offering more free shipping even on lower ASP items in some countries.
So that should move volume and merchants will go and remain where volume is moved for you. We've also began to complement with 1P purchasing, which deepens our relationship with a lot of the CPG brands, because we are now both buying from them and also helping them with marketplace. We have begun to build deeper advertising relationships with these CPG companies where there is co marketing and co spending occurring. So we offer them consumer insights, consumer data and ability to also market their CPG lines on the marketplace in addition to it being highly transactional and they can even go direct to consumer. And we are seeing interesting evidence that consumers who purchase in CPG are more engaged across other categories.
Again, the CPG category is still small and we need to see how well this data holds up. But the initial data is very encouraging in terms of CPG purchasing cohorts showing very good behavior across other categories posterior to having purchased CPG. So that's also encouraging for us.
Great. Thank you.
And ladies and gentlemen, that concludes the Q and A portion of today's conference. I'd like turn the call back over to our host.
Great. Thanks, everyone.
We are incredibly encouraged by the last 4 months. We are incredibly proud of the work of our teams in a difficult time, but we still have a lot of work to do. So we will get back to that and look forward to reporting again to you in a few months' time. Thank you very much.
Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's presentation. You may now disconnect and have a wonderful day.