Argentina e-business aims to create 5,000 more jobs in 5 years

BUENOS AIRES: The Argentine e- business Mercado Libre ( Free Market) announced that over the next five years it will invest some $100 million and create 5,000 “high quality” jobs in this South American country.

“We’re going to add 5,000 high quality jobs in Argentina” and “we will invest an additional $ 1.5 billion pesos ($ 100 million) in research and development, building new offices and training personnel,” Marcos Galperin, the firm’s executive director, said Tuesday.

At a ceremony together with Argentine President Mauricio Macri at Mercado Libre headquarters in the town of Vicente Lopez, located on the northern stretch of Buenos Aires’ metropolitan beltway, Galperin said that after creating 90 jobs in Argentina over the last five years, he will “keep investing” and “boosting the company’s presence” in the country.

In that regard, he announced that the firm will establish some rather spacious offices in other parts of Buenos Aires, spaces that will possibly be inaugurated in 2018. For Macri, these announcements “demonstrate the power” of an idea to “generate confidence,” as in the case of Mercado Libre, which, he believes, has understood how to create a “community of opportunities.”

The president said the company is an example worth following, since it was founded in 1999 “in two garages” and today is the No. 1 e- commerce company in the region and makes shopping easier for “thousands of people all day long all over the country.”

For his part, Galperin said that at present some 370,000 families live off the sales they make on his Web site and talked about the jobs this business activity has created. — Bernama