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7,100 | TSLA | 1 | 2,025 | 2025-04-22 17:30:00 | Tesla, Inc. | 27,444,752 | Emmanuel Rosner: Okay. But would you have, like, remote operators, for example?
Unidentified Company Representative: I mean, every now and then, if a car gets stuck or something, someone will, like, unblock it. But it’s just because we are a bit conservative and are tend towards more safety than even if we get stuck every now and then, we do have remote support. But it’s not going to be required for safe operation. If anything, it’s just required for more availability.
Elon Musk: Anyway, it’s only a couple months away, so you can just see for yourself in couple months in Austin.
Travis Axelrod: Great. Our next question comes from Edison at Deutsche Bank. Edison, please unmute yourself.
Edison Yu: Hi. Thank you very much for the question. So I wanted to ask about the Optimus supply chain going forward. You mentioned very fast ramp up. What do you envision that supply chain looking like? Is it going to require many more suppliers to be in the US now because of the tariffs? How does one kind of think about what needs to happen there?
Elon Musk: Let’s see how things settle out. I don’t know yet. Right. I mean, so some things we’re doing as we’ve already talked about, which is that we’re already taking tremendous steps to localize our supply chain. We’re more localized than any other manufacturer, and we have a lot of things underway to increase the localization, to reduce supply chain risk associated with geopolitical uncertainty. Did you have a follow-up?
Edison Yu: Yeah. Wanted to come back actually to the robotaxi then. Do you have a sense on how many cars or how big the scale will be initially and how that might ramp up? I know you’re targeting millions of vehicles in the second half kind of next year. But initially at launch, how many vehicles would be reasonable? And is it going to be as simple as if one goes to Austin, let’s say, in late June or July, you’d be able to request? |
7,101 | TSLA | 1 | 2,025 | 2025-04-22 17:30:00 | Tesla, Inc. | 27,444,752 | Elon Musk: Yeah. We’re still debating the exact number to start off on day one, but it’s, like, I don’t know, maybe 10 or 20 vehicles on day one. And watch it carefully. They scale it up rapidly after that. So, we want to make sure that you’re paying very close attention the first time this happens. But, yeah, you will be able to -- end of end of June or July, just go to Austin and order a Tesla for autonomous drive.
Travis Axelrod: Great. The next question comes from George at Canaccord.
George Gianarikas: Hi, thank you for taking my question. It has to do with FSD pricing. Can we envision when you launch unsupervised FSD that there could be sort of a multi-tiered pricing approach to unsupervised versus supervised similar to what you did with autopilot versus FSD in the past? Thank you.
Vaibhav Taneja: I mean, this is something which we’ve been thinking about. I mean, just so you know, for people who have been trying FSD and who’ve been using FSD, they think given the current pricing is too cheap because for $99, we’re basically getting a personal show.
Elon Musk: Yeah. I mean, we do need to give people more time to like, they want to look at like, like, key breakpoint is, can you read your text messages or not? Yes. Can you write a text message or not? Because, obviously, people are doing this, by the way, with autonomous cars all the time. And if you just go over drive down the highway and you’ll see people texting while driving, you know, doing 80 miles an hour.
Unidentified Company Representative: And putting on makeup on at the same time. |
7,102 | TSLA | 1 | 2,025 | 2025-04-22 17:30:00 | Tesla, Inc. | 27,444,752 | Unidentified Company Representative: And putting on makeup on at the same time.
Elon Musk: Yeah. Putting on makeup, doing their hair with them mirror down and texting and driving at 80 miles an hour. This is a common occurrence. So, people eating lunch, you name it. Shaving. So, anyway, but right now, the car is very insistent that you pay attention to the road. So, which reduces the value somewhat because it’s very rigorous about you paying attention to the road. And we’ll gradually lighten up on that with every few weeks or every month, we’ll relax that a little bit, make up so you can be more and more able to do things you want to do and not have the car to manage your attention. So that that that value, it’ll really be profound when you can basically do whatever you want, including sleep or and then that $99 is going to seem like the best $99 you’ve ever spent in your life.
Travis Axelrod: Great. And, George, do you have a follow-up?
George Gianarikas: My follow-up is about geographic expansion. Just maybe discuss additional markets. There’s been some news around India recently that you could launch, this year and next. Thank you. |
7,103 | TSLA | 1 | 2,025 | 2025-04-22 17:30:00 | Tesla, Inc. | 27,444,752 | Vaibhav Taneja: So, yeah, I mean, we we’ve been working on getting into India. India is a very hard market. And especially the current and I don’t want to talk just about tariffs, but the current tariff structure with India is that any car which we send in is subject to 70% tariff. Also, like, a 30% luxury tax on it. So, the same car which we’re selling is, like, 100% more expensive than what it is. So that creates a lot of, you know, anxiety. It’s like, people feel, okay, they’re paying too much for the car. And by the way, we’re not getting the money. The local government is getting the money. And that’s why we’ve been very careful trying to figure out when is the right time. We, like I said, we are working on it. It’s a great it would be a great market to enter because India has a big middle class, which we would want to tap in, and that is the market which we want to be in. But, again, these kind of things create a little bit of tension which we’re trying to work around.
Travis Axelrod: Great. Thank you so much. The next question comes from Adam Jonas at Morgan Stanley. Go ahead, Adam. We can’t hear you, Adam. So, maybe we’ll put you back in the queue, and we’ll move to Colin Langan from Wells Fargo, while Adam figures out his audio. Colin, please unmute yourself.
Colin Langan: Great. Do you hear me?
Travis Axelrod: Yes.
Colin Langan: You’re still sticking with division-only approach. A lot of autonomous people still have a lot of concerns about sun glare, fog, dust. Any color on how you anticipate on getting around those issues? Because of my understanding, it kind of blinds the camera when you get glare and stuff. |
7,104 | TSLA | 1 | 2,025 | 2025-04-22 17:30:00 | Tesla, Inc. | 27,444,752 | Elon Musk: Actually, it does not blind the camera. The we use an approach which is direct photon count. So when you see the -- a processed image, so the image that goes from the sort of photon counter, so the silicon photon counter that gets goes through a digital sig signal processor or image signal processor, that’s normally what happens. And then that that then the image that you see looks all washed out because if it’s, you point the camera at the sun, the post processing of the photon counting washes things out. It actually adds noise. So part of a breakthrough that we made some time ago was to go with direct photon counting and bypass the image signal processor. And that and then you can drive pretty much straight at the sun, and you can also see in what appears to be the blackest of night. And then here in fog, we can see as well as, like, people can, probably better, but I’d say probably slightly better than people, but than the average person anyway. And yeah.
Colin Langan: So the camera is able to see when there’s direct glare on it. I’m little surprised by that. Okay.
Elon Musk: Yeah.
Colin Langan: Okay. And then just there are obviously media reports the other day that the affordable model was delayed. It doesn’t sound like that’s correct. Those reports also talked about it being more of a cheaper version of the Model Y. Any color on what we should expect? Is it a cheaper version of Model Y, or is it actually going to be a design change with it?
Vaibhav Taneja: So I think Lars already covered it in answering one of the say.com cautions. The real thing which we are trying to focus on is affordability. And using our existing lines, there’s always limitations when you’re using existing lines as to how many different form factors can you bring to. So that’s the way I would say you should think about it. And I don’t know if Lars, anything more to add. |
7,105 | TSLA | 1 | 2,025 | 2025-04-22 17:30:00 | Tesla, Inc. | 27,444,752 | Lars Moravy: Yeah. And I think I said this before in other calls. Like, with the recent upgrades on the Model 3 and Model Y platforms, we made some pretty great cars at pretty great prices, and we added a bunch of features and things like that. I think it’s easy to consider that, moving forward, Tesla doesn’t make bad cars, and we always make, you know, our intent is not to make a car that is any worse than any car we’ve ever produced in the past. And so, models that come out in next months will be built on our lines and will resemble, in form and shape, the cars we currently make. And the key is that they’ll be affordable, and you’ll be able to buy one.
Travis Axelrod: Great. We might have time for one last question. Adam, we’ll try your audio again. You want to try to unmute yourself, Adam? All right. Unfortunately, it’s still not working. There you go.
Adam Jonas: Sorry, guys. Technology.
Travis Axelrod: Go ahead, Adam
Adam Jonas: Yeah. Hi. Yeah. In the February 28 Joe Rogan interview, Elon, you advocated for a ramp in tariffs, to give people time to adjust. Otherwise, quote, you said the system would break, and bad things would happen. So are things breaking yet? And if the announced -- as if the tariffs as announced remain in place, when would things start breaking? |
7,106 | TSLA | 1 | 2,025 | 2025-04-22 17:30:00 | Tesla, Inc. | 27,444,752 | Elon Musk: Well, at the risk of stating the obvious, I’m not -- I’m one of many advisors to the President, I am not the President. So, and -- but I made my opinion clear to the president and that -- and other people made their opinion clear to the President. He is the -- he listened -- he talks to many people, and he makes his decision. And, I’m hopeful that the President will observe whether my predictions are more accurate than the predictions of others and perhaps weigh my advice differently in the future. We shall see. But, I’m an advocate of predictable tariff structures and generally, I’m an advocate for free trade and lower tariffs. But now, one does need to take a look at where -- if some country is doing something predatory with tariffs or is providing extreme support for -- if a government is providing extreme financial support for a particular industry, then you have to do something to counteract that. So, but I think that’s on a case by case basis strategically. But, the President is the elected representative of the people and his fully within his rights to do what he would like to do.
Adam Jonas: Okay, Elon. I respect that. Just as just as a follow-up, and thanks again. Between China and the United States, who in your opinion is further ahead on the development of physical AI, specifically on humanoids, and also drones? I’d be interested in. And is it even close and kind of how, yeah seriously. |
7,107 | TSLA | 1 | 2,025 | 2025-04-22 17:30:00 | Tesla, Inc. | 27,444,752 | Elon Musk: I think you know the answer for drones. I mean a friend of mine, Naval, made this posted on X. I reposted it. But I think a prophetic statement, which is any country that cannot manufacture its own drones is doomed to be the vassal state of any country that can. And we can’t America cannot currently manufacture its own drones. But that’s again, unfortunately. So, China, I believe, manufactures about 70% of all drones. And if you look at the total supply chain, China is almost a 100% of drones, are have a supply chain dependency on China. So, China is in a very strong position. And, here in America, and we need to shift more of our people and resources to manufacturing because this is and I have a lot of respect for China because I think China is amazing, actually. But the United States should not have such a severe dependency on China for drones and be unable to make them unless China gives us the parts, which is currently the situation. With respect to humanoid robots, I don’t think there’s any company in any country that can match Tesla. Tesla and SpaceX are number one. So, and then now I’m a little concerned that on the leaderboard, ranks two through 10 will be Chinese companies. But I’m confident that rank one will be Tesla.
Travis Axelrod: Great. Well, I think that’s unfortunately all the time we have for today. We appreciate all your questions and look forward to talking to you next quarter. Thank you very much, and goodbye. |
7,108 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Operator: After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question and answer session. And if you would like to ask a question during this time, please press I would now like to turn the conference over to Deepa Subramanian, Vice President, Investor Relations. You may begin. Thank you, operator.
Deepa Subramanian: Thank you for joining us today, and welcome to Uber Technologies, Inc.'s fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings presentation. On the call today, we have Uber Technologies, Inc. CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, and CFO, Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah. During today's call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures, are included in the press release, supplemental slides, and our filings with the SEC, each of which is posted to investors.uber.com. Certain statements in this presentation and on this call are forward-looking statements. You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements, and we do not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements we make today, except as required by law. For more information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements, please refer to the press release we issued today as well as the risks and uncertainties described in our most recent Form 10-Ks and in other filings made with the SEC. We published our quarterly earnings, press release, prepared remarks, and supplemental slides to our investor relations website earlier today, and we ask you to review those documents if you haven't already. We will open the call to questions following brief opening remarks from Dara. With that, let me hand it over to Dara. |
7,109 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: Thanks, Deepa. So the theme of this quarter is acceleration. We accelerated growth in audience, trips, and the top line. Gross bookings growth on a constant currency basis beat even our own expectations, coming in above the high end of our guidance. This performance was powered by strong product innovation across our platform, driving multi-product use to an all-time high of 37% of Uber Technologies, Inc. consumers. It was also a stellar few months for the Uber One membership program, where we added five million members in the quarter, bringing our total member base to 30 million, up nearly 60% year on year. We are now one year into the three-year outlook we presented to investors last February, and pleased to say that in 2024, we cleanly exceeded our commitments on all three components of that framework. Gross bookings, 21% versus our commitment to mid to high teens constant currency CAGR. Adjusted EBITDA grew 60% year on year versus the high thirties to forty percent CAGR. An annual free cash flow conversion as a percentage of EBITDA was 106% versus our indication of 90 plus percent. We are thrilled with this performance and have started 2025 with a lot of momentum. Despite FX headwinds, we expect continued strong growth in Q1, with 17% to 21% constant currency gross bookings growth and continued profit expansion. So lastly, on autonomous, I'd encourage everyone to read our prepared remarks in supplemental slides where we spend some more time this quarter sharing our perspective on the state of AVs. The key takeaway is that while AV technology is advancing, commercialization will take significantly longer. And we have conviction that Uber Technologies, Inc. will be the indispensable go-to-market partner for AV players. This is undoubtedly one of our top priorities, and we're investing a lot of technical, strategic, and management attention to this topic with lots more to come. Just today, we announced that Austin residents can sign up for an interest list right in their Uber app to increase |
7,110 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | to come. Just today, we announced that Austin residents can sign up for an interest list right in their Uber app to increase their chances of matching with a Waymo AV when we launch next month. With that, operator, let's take your questions. |
7,111 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Operator: Thank you. Your first question comes from Brian Nowak with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.
Brian Nowak: Thanks for taking my questions. I have two, one on autonomous and one on the core rides business. So the first one, Dara, is on autonomous. As you think about the portfolio of assets you have at the company, do you think philosophically about investing more in autonomous assets, be it first-party car fleet or other fleet management tools? Or where are you on sort of the portfolio of the current assets from an autonomous perspective? And then on the core business, talk to us a little bit about how to think about puts and takes on rides incremental margins, and sort of profitability in the first quarter and throughout 2025? Thanks. |
7,112 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: Absolutely. So, Brian, I think on autonomous, we think we are very, very well positioned. We're investing aggressively across all parts of the portfolio. I think the way that you can think about it is that every new product that we build, we first build by going out and investing in supply and building out kind of liquidity on the supply side. And you really need that kind of magical liquidity to be able to match kind of variable demand and provide the five to six-minute, consistent ETAs in order for the network effect that you see on a local basis for us to work. And in autonomous, it's the same thing. Like, we did it with taxi. We've done it with low cost. We've done it with high capacity vehicles. Did it for Uber Eats in the past. It's just an investment in building out the supply base to match variable demand, and then the magic happens in a particular city. You'll see that magic in work in Austin coming up in a month. As far as investments that we made, you know, we're absolutely investing in fleet supply. This is an investment that we made for over a long time. Fleets now represent about 15% of our inventory. So while we are very well positioned to have kind of fleets in market that can manage autonomous, we are looking at acquiring a ton of depots with electric required for charging the fleets, etcetera. And, obviously, we are going out with various autonomous players and building out technical partnerships and then talking with OEMs about securing supply as their manufacturing platforms are preparing to get the scale for the next generation of autonomous. So it's a broad investment. It's across a very, very low number of units, so you're not really gonna notice it in the P&L. But we do think that this investment is going to prepare us as autonomous starts to scale and as kind of the commercial economics start to be apparent. But even with these investments, which I would term as aggressive investments, you're unlikely to impact the three-year outlook that we've given you. We think we |
7,113 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | I would term as aggressive investments, you're unlikely to impact the three-year outlook that we've given you. We think we can. This is kind of the power of man, which is we can deliver and some of it through your outlook, and at the same time, we can be investing aggressively in AD supply in every way. |
7,114 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: Brian, it's Prashanth. I'm gonna take the second part of that question, and I think your question was really around the mobility profitability trends and outlook. So maybe I'll start with just a reminder that we want folks to look at the business the same way we do, which is at a total company level. And we're making investment decisions across our segments based on where we see the strongest returns and growth potential. So we're gonna continue to invest in mobility consistent with the overall profitability framework that we gave you guys back in February. So I wouldn't read anything into sort of how mobility profitability was other than we're seeing a lot of opportunity to continue to invest and drive growth. In this quarter that just closed, our EBITDA margin was 7.8% of gross bookings, and that was up 30 basis points year over year. We see continued benefits from supply incentives, leverage on the operating cost, and partially offset some of that tailwind by higher insurance costs, which we've talked about before. But, overall, these investments are really helping us put up that strong mobility growth number, which was at a constant currency basis, 24% in Q4, and we saw acceleration in the US. So we're leaning into things like membership. I think, in the prepared remarks, we talked about 30 million members now that's up five million sequentially, and I think it's up 60% year over year. Teams is another great area. I think we've more than doubled the number of countries that Uber Teens is available in the fourth quarter. And the usual areas like finding the right balance in marketplace and continuing to open up new geographies and some products. So, again, it's part of our overall model that we gave you back in February of last year, which is to drive that mid to high teens GB growth and that high thirties to forty percent profitability, and we'll continue to make the trade-offs we think are necessary to hit those numbers and also ensure that once we leave that three-year framework, |
7,115 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | make the trade-offs we think are necessary to hit those numbers and also ensure that once we leave that three-year framework, we're still driving a great top line. Thanks for the question. |
7,116 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Brian Nowak: Great. Thank you both.
Operator: The next question comes from Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.
Eric Sheridan: Thank you so much for taking the questions. Maybe building on Brian's question on supply and just widening it out a little bit in both businesses. You talked on prior earnings calls about sort of extending the network as a potential stimulant for rider growth and supply density. Can you talk a little bit about those efforts and how they continue to scale and how we should be thinking about them as a potential growth driver for 2025 and beyond as you continue to scale into more areas of mobility? And then on the delivery side, any update on user behavior, obviously, the array of supply that's available to a shopper inside Uber Eats today is very different than it was twelve, eighteen months ago. What is that doing to user behavior, frequency, basket size? How should we be thinking about supply impacting those dynamics in the delivery business? Thank you. |
7,117 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: Great. Thank you for the question. So, first, just as a reminder for folks, the way we think of the business and we encourage everyone else to is our growth is a combination of audience, so the number of users who are hitting our platform every month, how often they are engaging with the platform, which we measure as frequency, and then you round it out with price to turn trips into GBs. So in the last couple of quarters, we've made some comments on how we're focusing on less dense or some of the sparser, which I think is where your question is coming from. So as a reminder, the growth framework through 2026 is for that core business to grow in the low to mid-teens and then the growth bets we're making to kind of help push us up into that higher teens. And the initiative that we're focusing on in those less dense sparse or geos is really around driving the penetration into those less dense areas so we can extend sort of a length of time that we can get that core business to continue growing at an attractive rate. One of the things we've observed is that in our more populated or dense areas versus where we were maybe two or three years ago, growth has started to come down a bit because those areas obviously are more penetrated. Now we can offset this by pushing out into less areas. This started initially as a US delivery initiative, and it's really expanded now into a global one. I would say that as we focused on the US delivery business, we realized that the same opportunity existed across mobility and really around the world. And we're finding real promise really on the mobility side both in the US and non-US as well as in non-US delivery. Where we're now creating some more programs in this space. We see much higher growth in these less sparser areas. I think we've talked about in the past that it's not uncommon for us to see one and a half or more times faster growth outside of more dense areas. And we do that a few ways. On the mobility side, it is supply. So it's really about where |
7,118 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | growth outside of more dense areas. And we do that a few ways. On the mobility side, it is supply. So it's really about where we are investing into supply such as creating incentives to bring new drivers into those areas, opening more cities and locations. For example, when you think of the UK, you often think of London, but for us now, Liverpool, Manchester, those become areas that we wanna continue to grow out in Europe. We've got our efforts to add taxis, which will help us in some of those more sparse or populated areas. So once we have the supply, then we can use incentives to make sure the pricing is right to spur demand and sort of get that flywheel going that is the magic of the Uber marketplace. And then on the product enhancements, I would say that the option that we give consumers who are in some of these less dense areas is they can pay with price or they can pay with time. If you wanna pay with price, you can use something like our reserve product, which will give you a very high accuracy if you'll know when your ride is gonna be there, and it allows us to use our marketplace tech to make sure that we find someone who's able to be at the location you want when you need them there, or if you're willing to pay with time, we extend the wait time, which allows us again, to use the marketplace algos to find drivers or couriers who are in the region, but may take a little bit more time to get there. And we're finding that in the suburbs, people are more open to longer wait times. And then I think on the delivery and the growth rates there, what we're doing, listen, the basics remain the same, which is it's all about selection, it's about price, and it's about quality. In terms of selection, we got over a million active merchants up about 16% year on year. These are big and small merchants. Our sales per merchant continue to increase on a year on year basis, but if you look at our total kind of penetration here, in our top ten markets, we have about a third of the merchants out on those markets. So we |
7,119 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | our total kind of penetration here, in our top ten markets, we have about a third of the merchants out on those markets. So we think there's a huge amount of runway as it relates to selection. Selection increases conversion, but also brings in new audience once eaters figure out that their great neighborhood audience is available on Uber Eats as well. Second for us is price, and the number of merchant-funded offers, so to speak, to lowering price is at an all-time high. This is a really important initiative in terms of merchants being able to promote on the network and getting boosted in terms of their sort order for that promotion. And then membership, which Prashanth talked about now, 30 million members up 60% year on year. That table membership essentially effectively is delivering discounts to our most loyal members. So price is actually something that we're very, very actively working on. And then, of course, quality, making sure that our defect rate or rate continues to go down in terms of making sure that every delivery is a perfect delivery. And then on the back end side, for example, as it relates to shoppers, for grocery, we're really focused on the quality of those shoppers. You know, it's a lot easier, for example, just to deliver, let's say, an online food delivery to a home shopping for twenty items, twenty-five items, and getting it perfectly right is much more a challenge. So we're really shifting our marketplace metrics from cost and efficiency to cost efficiency and quality as well. When you bring all that together, selection, price, quality, increased marketing campaigns, you hopefully, you'll see our Super Bowl campaign out there. You get a good combination of growth in merchants, growth in audience, growth in frequency, and it's all powered by our push into less dense areas and membership well. So we're very, very happy with the trends there. You saw delivery gross bookings accelerate quarter on quarter. And we think that's just more evidence that we got a long, long runway here. Alright. |
7,120 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | bookings accelerate quarter on quarter. And we think that's just more evidence that we got a long, long runway here. Alright. Next question. |
7,121 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Operator: The next question comes from Justin Post with Bank of America. Your line is open.
Justin Post: Great. Thanks. Appreciate it. Couple of questions on the prepared remarks. Dara, you mentioned nine different AV companies. And also, you know, OEMs in your prepared remarks. US-centric, you know, we're only really seeing two companies with really high visibility right now. Can you talk about how you think the market could evolve from here and why it might not be just two companies and what you're seeing globally? And then on the constant currency outlook, I think you did 21% in Q4. You're guiding 17% to 21% in Q1, but also there's prepared remarks about kind of being stable. So maybe talk about what would drive you down to 17, 18% constant currency or what would cause you to be more at the higher end of the 21% in Q1? Thank you. |
7,122 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: Sure. I think on AVs, first of all, the opportunity we think in the US and worldwide for AVs is enormous. We estimate that the US market alone is a trillion-dollar opportunity as you commercialize APS scale and bring the unit economics down. And while, you know, we're incredibly excited in terms of the development of the technology, you see Waymo in market, obviously, who's a terrific partner. And a number of players including Tesla trying to, you know, get to prime time, so to speak, we think that the commercialization of the technology is gonna take way, way longer. And by the time that the technology commercializes, all over the world and in the US, you're gonna see many, many more players get over the finish line as it relates to technology. Just stepping back for a second, and this applies for the US and applies all over the world. There are five factors that you need all of which need to come together for scale commercialization of the business. And scale commercialization is like, ten, twenty, thirty percent of our volumes on a US basis, let's say, of a global basis. First, you have to get regulations. You gotta enable regulations. There are national regulations, state regulations, city regulations. Pretty complicated. All the team regulators have to get comfortable with this new technology on the streets affecting our everyday. Second, you know, in order to get regulators comfortable, we think you need a superhuman safety record. Like, we don't think it's good enough for an autonomous driver to be better than a human. I think we have the chance to be multiple times better than the human. And I think the industry should take that kind of chance and insist on a superhuman safety record. You're seeing Waymo definitely get there and many, many other players kind of working to get their safety record up and demonstrate that safety record as well. Third, you need a cost-effective hardware platform. Like, the hardware platforms now, they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. You've gotta get |
7,123 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | hardware platform. Like, the hardware platforms now, they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. You've gotta get to the tens of thousands of dollars. There's a lot of work to be done to get there in many, many years. To build out these scale hardware platforms. Fourth, you need, like, first-rate on-the-ground operations. This is what I was talking about before in terms of fleets and recharging and cleaning and, you know, finding lost items, millions of lost items we do every year. And then fifth, you need a high utilization network that can manage the variable demand every day on a seasonal basis. With flexible supply as well, which we think our hybrid network is kind of the best solution there. You need all five to come together, and we think the only way that all five could come together is Uber Technologies, Inc. partnered up with the AD ecosystem. And we think we're kind of an indispensable part of, again, achieving all five and moving from a really, really cool, amazing technology to a really terrific scale business. Now I think that you're gonna see lots of experimentation and a b players, you know, going direct, working with us, etcetera. But especially, we're looking forward to our launches in Austin, Atlanta, where I think we're gonna demonstrate, you know, AV provider like Waymo pretty clearly that a combination of a great and Uber Technologies, Inc. is the best combination out there. And I think this is gonna apply in the US, it's gonna apply all over the world. So today, when you're in the tech development phase, yeah, the US, you don't see too many players, but by the time all five of these entities come together, regulatory, etcetera, which is gonna be years from now, I think you're gonna have a number of players getting to prime time both in the US and internationally. I think that's great for the ecosystem. We think competition is great for the industry. Kinda you're seeing, you know, with deep seat coming in and generative AI, like, how exciting that competition is. And we think the same thing |
7,124 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | you know, with deep seat coming in and generative AI, like, how exciting that competition is. And we think the same thing that's happening in generative AI is happening in AV as well. You'll see it definitely in the US, and you're gonna see it all over the world. |
7,125 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: Justin, I'll take the second part of that question, which I think was on putting our Q1 guide in perspective. So let's maybe start with a recap of Q4. 21% GB growth at constant currency year over year, and now we have delivered 21% or four out of the last five quarters, and that growth continues to be led by audience, which is an impressive number when you think that we're adding roughly 20 million, a little over 20 million actives even at the scale we have today. It's a great indicator of how the product continues to drive or get acceptance across the globe. Gonna be relatively similar to Q4 on an underlying basis. So that is 17% to 21% on FX neutral GB growth and great leverage on that with up 33% at the midpoint for EBITDA. So I'll break down some elements of that GB growth to help put it in context. First, our guidance for the first quarter includes us overcoming some notable headwinds. First, we are lapping a leap year quarter from last year. And in the Q1 guide, we've already incorporated the impact from the devastating fires in Los Angeles as well as some unusual weather patterns, particularly in the south where there was some crazy snow that came through there, which did shut down a number of cities. So just making those adjustments there, you can easily get to another one to two points of GB growth if you were to normalize for that. Second, we've got the growth in Q1 again, going to be led by audience similar to what we saw in Q4. So we probably see a little bit of a rinse and repeat in terms of the breakdown between audience and frequency in Q1 versus in comparison to Q4. And third, where I'll spend a little more time just to help people understand is how to think about foreign exchange within the context of Uber Technologies, Inc. So we are expecting FX to be a larger top-line headwind in Q1. Think five and a half percentage points of headwind, and that compares to closer to three points in Q4. And about half of our GBs come from outside the US. And then of those that are |
7,126 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | that compares to closer to three points in Q4. And about half of our GBs come from outside the US. And then of those that are outside the US, Latin America, which is a sizable region, represents about a quarter of our international GVs. So now focusing specifically on Latin America, we had a number of countries that saw significant currency depreciation against the US dollar. Notably Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil. And these are top twenty countries for us, so we certainly feel the impact of them on the top line. What is helpful for folks to remember with regards to Uber Technologies, Inc. is while we price our trips or our orders in local currency, we also pay our drivers and merchants in local currency, so that creates a natural hedge. Meaning that our profit exposure from those foreign currency fluctuations tends to be driven by those US dollar denominated expenses, which will be some of our tech organization, our G&A, and other US build cost structure. So the way we try to operate the company is that we will take FX on the top line, but as a management team, we do our best to absorb those impacts in the profit line, whether they be favorable or headwinds to us, to kind of continue to drive the consistent margin expansion story that you've seen over the last couple of years. |
7,127 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: And, Justin, I just one comment from me. Listen, I think a lot of investors ask how long can Uber Technologies, Inc. keep growing at the scale as fast as it does and sometimes on planning time, we do as well. I'll just remind you that our gross bookings growth rate this year actually accelerated over last year. So this is a business that continues to surprise us pleasantly in terms of the runway ahead.
Justin Post: Great. Thanks for your time and attention.
Dara Khosrowshahi: Great. Next question.
Operator: The next question is from Doug Anmuth with JPMorgan. Your line is open.
Doug Anmuth: Great. Thanks for taking questions. I have two. Dara, first, just following up on the AV commercialization challenges, I'm curious if there's anything additional you can share on your experience with Waymo in Phoenix and just how you're helping drive utilization and demand there in particular. And then for Prashanth, just given the healthier pricing backdrop in rides that we're seeing through 2025, can you just talk about how you're thinking about the sustainability of insurance costs and those slower insurance price increases through the year? Thank you. |
7,128 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: Absolutely. So, Doug, in terms of AV, the first thing I've said I would caution is that the scale of these AV deployments both for us in Phoenix with Waymo generally, are really, really small right now. For perspective, like, our growth in San Francisco, Phoenix, and LA in Q4 accelerated versus Q3. So just the numbers are really small, and it's very difficult to, you know, get patterning based on these smaller numbers. Our very, very early experience in Phoenix suggests that and some of the other deployments that we've got suggest that the Uber Technologies, Inc. network is able to drive significantly higher utilization versus any kind of first-party network could just because of the scale and the variability in terms of supply and demand in a particular market. And, you know, the other pattern that we see is customers love the product. So the opt-in rate for customers the second time that they're offered an AV is significantly higher than the opt-in rate the first time. So it's a great product, and you see that in terms of pricing. You can actually price the product at a premium too, which is terrific. So those are very, you know, it's a great product. Doesn't really have an effect on an overall business. We're able to drive really strong utilization. We are now preparing for some pretty big launches in the tens going to the hundreds of vehicles later this year in Austin and Atlanta. And we will have much, much more to tell you about the results there, and you know, we're quite optimistic that the results are gonna be quite strong. |
7,129 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: Great. That second question's I got insurance. Let me maybe I'll start with the reminder that the US mobility business is required to carry insurance with a liability coverage that is often, usually, much higher than what is required for other modes of passenger transportation. And in some cases, it can be up to fifty times more coverage than what is required in a personal vehicle. So it is a benefit that we provide to our drivers as part of being a contractor for Uber Technologies, Inc. So at a macro level, we're pleased to see that the insurance pressure is easing. The consumer price index motor vehicle insurance is now only growing at 11% year over year in December, which is still a big number, but it's down more than 50% from what we saw in April where it peaked in the low twenties. So with the external headwinds peaking, we are also starting to see the benefits of all the internal initiatives that we've been driving such as the tech innovation and policy work coming through. So our outlook now, and we might have signaled this last quarter, and I think we have more confidence today than we did even in Q4, that the US mobility's insurance cost is likely to be high single digits on a per trip basis in 2025, and that's meaningfully lower than we've seen for the last two years. It's coming from a couple of elements that we've talked about before. We've talked about tech, risk management, and regulatory. So let me just double click on a couple of those. On the tech side, last year, we were piloting and we are now expanding to almost all of our US markets. A driver insights dashboard, and this allows drivers to see more about their driving behavior. And we're pulling data from their phone and the telemetrics on things like speeding, harsh braking, or acceleration, etcetera. And it shows drivers how they can drive more safely to improve their driving score. What we're hearing from drivers is just the ability for them to see that information, which where they were not aware of before, is |
7,130 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | we're hearing from drivers is just the ability for them to see that information, which where they were not aware of before, is improving their behavior. But to sort of encourage that improvement, we are also expanding the use of our advantage mode for drivers. And this is where you can actually get higher earnings and better route matching opportunities if you have, among other things, a better driver safety score. So yeah, encouraging giving them visibility to the score and then sort of encouraging the behavior we want through economics is gonna continue to play out through the use of our tech. On the risk management side, we've essentially finalized terms with all of our carriers on the insurance side, and market pricing is stable. So we've got a much better view as we look into 2025 of where that is, and clearly having a captive insurance company and being able to offer to self-insure when we don't get the pricing we want continues to give us great leverage in those negotiations. And then lastly, a little bit longer cycle, but it's the regulatory work that we're going on. And you probably see us out in the news and in respective markets where we are. We're creating a bit more attention on the need for insurance reform on a state-by-state basis. We are starting to get progress in areas like Georgia, California, New Jersey with more to come. |
7,131 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: And just to clarify one of my earlier comments, the growth in San Francisco, Phoenix, and LA comment that I made was for all of mobility. That mobility growth in Q4 over Q3 in those markets actually accelerated our overall mobility business, not just safety.
Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: K. Alright. Done. We'll go to the next question. Thank you.
Operator: The next question is from Michael Morton with MoffettNathanson. Your line is open.
Michael Morton: Hi. Thank you for the question and appreciate the new remarks on AVs. I could follow-up on a question on a comment Dara made earlier. And just general business models with AV. When you talk about securing supply from OEM, speaking about Uber Technologies, Inc. buying cars directly? And then you're thinking over the long term about potential business models with AVs, could you talk about an agency model versus a merchant model of renting AVs for the day. And then a question we get from investors is how much of your global mobility business do you see being addressable by autonomous vehicles due to different driver costs in certain markets compared to the AV cost. Thank you so much. |
7,132 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: Yeah. Absolutely, Michael. So in terms of the business model, I think there are gonna be there's gonna be a ton of experimentation around the business models. I think early on, you know, we've got a big balance sheet and we can buy cars. I think eventually it's gonna turn into the fleet partners that we have essentially buying cars and getting financing from third parties. That you see right now with electric vehicles. A lot of our fleet partners actually are able to finance these EVs, etcetera. In the early days, you're not gonna have kind of a financing construct in place, and clarity regarding what residual values are for these cars. So I think that, you know, we'll put up some balance sheet risk. Our fleet partners will put up some balance sheet risk over a period of time. I think that most of the ownership will be a combination of fleet partners. You might see some financial players, you know, kind of infrastructure players just like there are entities, REACH, that own hotels. You will have kind of fleet entities as well. And then, hopefully, there'll be some kind of individual ownership as well of people, small businesses putting up these cars and these fleets and taking care of the car, so sort of small business fleets. But, again, we see around the world for ourselves operating an SMB fleet model as well. So there's gonna be a ton of experimentation. But early on, you know, we will take some balance sheet risk in order to get catalyzed the industry, so to speak. But, ultimately, we think all of it is gonna be financialized. In terms of AV, I think a couple of things in terms of the addressable market. First of all, I think early on, right now, the cost of AV is building that comes close to the cost of drivers. So I think the first markets that are going to be penetrated are gonna depend on regulation, first of all. And, again, the regulatory environment is pretty complicated. And second is kind of the revenue per mile in the markets. This would tend to be US markets or European markets |
7,133 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | complicated. And second is kind of the revenue per mile in the markets. This would tend to be US markets or European markets where the revenue per mile is higher and will tend to be in the center of cities. You know, the operation domain for many of these AV deployments is very, very limited and over a period of time is going to expand. So I think in the next five years, the addressable market's gonna be probably, you know, in the order of ten to fifteen percent of the overall marketplace. And then gradually is going to expand over a period of time over the next fifteen years or so. |
7,134 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: Great. Thank you, Michael. Sarah, we have time for one more question.
Operator: Thank you. Your final question will come from the line of Nikhil Devnani with Bernstein. Your line is open.
Nikhil Devnani: Hi. Thank you for taking the question. Dara, last time you talked about price elasticity and today the letter talks about affordability. And the Q1 EBITDA guide suggests it's starting to moderate that profit growth. First, how much of this EBITDA guide is impacted by FX? And then bigger picture, I guess, the skeptical take would be that pricing was a tailwind for the business for several years. We're now hitting that ceiling. And as you push more on affordability, gonna be a headwind to margins going forward. So in your view, why is that not the right take? How do you eventually get a good return on these lower-cost rides and drive operating leverage in the mobility business if you're leaning into that value proposition for consumers? Thank you.
Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: Yeah. Nikhil, why don't I just take the first part of it and let Dara take the longer part of it there. I've mentioned, I went through a little bit on the FX side. And our philosophy on FX. Clearly, the impact of foreign exchange and the profits that we collect in those foreign jurisdictions when they come back to the US are worth less. And with more than half of our business outside the US, there is an impact there. We have chosen not to pass that volatility on to investors. We find ways to manage that, whether it be good news or bad news, within the company using the levers that we have and sort of that's been the philosophy of the company. We talked about that in the prepared remarks. So it is not a zero impact. It certainly weighs on the business, but for your modeling purposes, you should think of FX as a top-line impact and leave it to the management team in both good days and bad days to do what we can to show steady margin improvement regardless of FX. |
7,135 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: Yeah. Nikhil, I would say in terms of pricing, whether it's a tailwind or a headwind, I just say that the vast majority of pricing that we have taken in the market has been in the US. And the vast majority of that price increase has been hassle on cost insurance. So it shows up in gross bookings. It shows up in cost. And that part of the price increase is ultimately economically neutral. We've always believed in kind of a model where we build out premium products. So this is our U4B product, which is a highly premium reserve product well for U4B. We introduced business block as well and using the higher margin of the premium products to fund the lower-cost products like UberX share and shuttle, etcetera. Taxi, two-wheelers, three-wheelers. I think we've been able to consistently demonstrate in the past the ability to balance top-line growth and bottom-line growth, and that's our expectation going forward. And I would tell you that today, you know, when we talked about that three-year guidance in terms of mid to high teens top line and then a bottom line of in the thirties to forty percent growth, we are more confident than ever that we can meet that guideline in almost any pricing environment but kind of the way that we run the company is to run it for both top and bottom line. And I think you'll see us continue to deliver on both of those going forward. |
7,136 | UBER | 4 | 2,024 | 2025-02-05 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: Thanks, Nikhil. So before we wrap up here, I wanted to share some news. After nearly six action-packed years, Deepa has decided to leave Uber Technologies, Inc. Today is gonna be her last day with us, and so on behalf of Dara, the leadership team, and the global finance org, I do wanna thank Deepa for her many contributions to Uber Technologies, Inc. and wish her all the best in her next challenge. Oji Krishnamurthy, who many of you know well, is gonna step in to lead IR in addition to his existing role managing the strategic finance team. So Bologie will be joining you for the Q4 callbacks this morning along with Alex and the IR team. This quarter, we are going to be in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Orlando, and Boston. So please reach out to Alex or the IR team if you're looking to see us in any of those cities. And then just to close, I wanna thank the Uber Technologies, Inc. team for all their great work in 2024, and thank you for joining us this morning.
Operator: This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect. |
7,137 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Operator: Hello, and welcome to the Uber Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the call over to Deepa Subramanian, Vice President, Investor Relations. You may begin.
Deepa Subramanian : Thank you, operator. Thank you for joining us today, and welcome to Uber's Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Presentation. On the call today, we have Uber CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi; and CFO, Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah. During today's call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures are included in the press release, supplemental slides and our filings with the SEC, each of which is posted to investor.uber.com. Certain statements in this presentation and on this call are forward-looking statements. You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements, and we do not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements we make today, except as required by law. For more information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements, please refer to the press release we issued today as well as the risks and uncertainties section described in our most recent Form 10-K and in other filings made with the SEC. We published our quarterly earnings press release and prepared remarks, supplemental slides to our Investor Relations website earlier today, and we ask you review those documents if you haven't already. We will open the call to questions following beef opening remarks from Dara and Prashanth. With that, let me hand it over to Dara. |
7,138 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi : Thanks, Deepa. Uber delivered yet another strong quarter, a record quarter of profitable growth with gross bookings up 20% year-on-year in constant currency. We also generated an all-time high GAAP operating profits of more than $1 billion. This performance was powered by new records in audience and frequency as more people and more places are using Uber more often. Our underlying platform continues to strengthen, more than 7.8 million people now drive, deliver shop with Uber, earning more than $18 billion during the quarter. More than 25 million people are now Uber One members, up 70% year-on-year. Our advertising business grew nearly 80% year-on-year, and our autonomous strategy is working as our 14 AV partners are clearly understanding the significant value Uber can bring to their deployment plans. Thanks to the team for another great quarter. And before we go to Q&A, I'd like to hand it over to Parashanth to briefly reiterate our capital allocation approach. |
7,139 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: Thank you, Dara. Let me add my welcome to our third quarter earnings call. I wanted to jump in quickly with an update on our share repurchase program as well as a reminder of the capital allocation framework that we presented at the investor update back in February. Our capital allocation priorities remain unchanged, responsibly investing in future growth and returning capital to shareholders. On the growth front, we believe we still have a huge amount of organic opportunity in front of us, including our fast-growing portfolio of new products, which are now cooking at $20 billion of annual GB, with geographic expansion, especially into less densely populated markets, and lastly, with increasing user frequency, including through our membership efforts. On capital returns, we plan to steadily increase our share repo in the coming quarters. Specifically, we intend to work our way towards a durable share count reduction in 2025. Now to quickly touch on M&A, we remain extraordinary disciplined, and I want to emphasize that all opportunities are reviewed with a rigorous value creation mindset and Uber's bar for M&A has never been higher. As Dara has said, the best deal is not having to do a deal at all, and we are in that enviable position today. So we are excited to continue on our exceptional path of organic growth while sticking to our firm commitment to you, our shareholder, of capital returns. So with that, let me hand it back to Deepa to open the call for questions.
Deepa Subramanian : Sarah, can we have the first question, please?
Operator: Your first question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs. |
7,140 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Operator: Your first question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs.
Eric Sheridan: The commentary, especially around the capital allocation policy. I want to come back to the concept you introduced in the letter around less dense markets. Could you go a little bit deeper in both the opportunity set, but also some of the operational dynamics of building supply as well as stimulating demand in less dense markets? And how we should be thinking about that scaling in the years ahead? |
7,141 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: Yes, Eric. We think it’s a terrific opportunity. And frankly, sometimes we take ourselves for not recognizing it properly earlier. Uber started as a company in the middle of big cities, and our biggest cities, Sao Paulo, New York, et cetera. Continue to be the largest source of demand. But continuously, we’ve seen that growth outside of the core in the boroughs of New York now extending into the suburbs or in secondary and tertiary cities has been higher than the core itself almost accidentally, and this is true for Mobility and Delivery as well. And really for us, the start of our focus on less dense areas started with Delivery. In the U.S., especially if you look at noncore cities, et cetera, it’s 60%, 70% of the market, so the majority of the market there. Generally, it’s growing faster than city centers as well. So we’ve really started focusing on improving selection in those areas. And then like you said, then building out the liquidity that's necessary in terms of both demand and supply, couriers and making sure that those couriers are busy. And that kind of cycle, that positive cycle of investing in supply and demand together, increasing liquidity, getting better ETAs, getting better service levels starts to accelerate and add to itself. And we’re starting to see that now in Delivery, but not just in the U.S. We’ve extended this focus in the U.K., Australia, really all over the world. We’re looking at the density by quartile of all of the areas that we deliver to or all the areas that we are giving mobility services to people to, and we are actively investing in those less dense areas. And we think the opportunity set there is very, very significant, both in Mobility and Delivery. So we think it’s early days and – but it is a focus of both Mobility and Delivery. And I think it will be a tailwind to our core business in terms of growth over the next 2 to 3 years and hopefully even more than that.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Brian Nowak with Morgan Stanley. |
7,142 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Brian Nowak with Morgan Stanley.
Brian Nowak: I have two. First of all, I wanted to sort of drill in a little bit more to the U.S. mobility bookings trends. Dara, you sort of look at how the business has trended since your investor update. Are there any areas where you're sort of exceeded or come in a little shy versus where you thought the U.S. rides business would be growing? And has anything changed in sort of your outlook for U.S. rides contribution to growth over the tenure of the outlook that you gave at the investor update? That's the first 1 on U.S. rides. And the second one, just on Phoenix and sort of Arizona around Vaymo. Anything you can share on sort of early signs of incremental volume to Uber from the Vaymo partnership in that market? |
7,143 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: Sure. Absolutely. So in terms of our U.S. mobility growth, the U.S. generally has been kind of the gift that keeps on giving. It’s our largest market, a little less than 50% of our GBs, but more than 50% of our profitability. So the business continues to grow and thrive. We are seeing in the U.S. a couple of trends. One is that we’ve been very public in terms of the increase – the substantial increase in commercial insurance costs really that have happened over the past 2 years. And as we have passed on those increases in cost, especially in states where insurance costs are very, very high, like New Jersey or California. As we pass on those costs, we’ve seen the – kind of the typical elasticity from consumers, which is as GBs, as price goes up, the transaction growth slows down a bit. And that elasticity is usually one for one. It’s no different than what we’ve seen. And actually, we’ve seen our competitor do the same as well. We are seeing weekday growth stronger than weekend growth as well. So people are definitely getting back to back work. I think like the weekend party hours, maybe consumers are a little more price sensitive in terms of whether they choose to go out or not, but weekday is very strong, and Uber For Business especially is very, very strong. Overall, it’s up over 50%. I’m not sure what the U.S. number is, but it’s really strong, both in terms of selling to enterprises, selling to health, selling to transit systems as well. That is definitely a bright spot for our business as well. And then we’re not really seeing any signs of consumers trading down. Like our share product is growing very quickly as match rates continue to increase. We’re investing in newer products like Uber Teens to kind of bring in this new demographic into our system and then shuttles into our system as well. So overall, we’re quite optimistic in terms of how the U.S. market is developing, but those insurance cost increases are definitely resulting in the kinds of slowdowns in transactions that we |
7,144 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | is developing, but those insurance cost increases are definitely resulting in the kinds of slowdowns in transactions that we expected based on elasticity experimentation that we’ve done in the past. I think the good news is that while the insurance cost will continue to go up, we expect them to go up at a lower rate, so to speak, both because the market is normalizing and because we’re taking a lot of action in terms of safer routes, safer drivers, encouraging drivers to drive more safely to try to get those insurance costs down, but that’s kind of a slow-moving target, so to speak. So pretty optimistic in general in terms of the U.S. markets overall going forward. And then to your second question in terms of autonomous and incrementality, in Arizona and Phoenix, at this point, Brian, it’s really too soon to tell. We have relatively modest number of vehicles out there. We know that the experience with Vaymo is absolutely terrific. It’s a delightful experience. Riders are rating their Vaymo driver at very, very high levels. And so we love the experience that it is bringing forth. I think the real test is going to be the expansion of our partnership, and it’s a significant expansion with Vaymo in Austin and Atlanta. We’re starting next year, you’re going to get Vaymos in the hundreds in those markets. And I think then we will see whether there’s incrementality as it relates to autonomous or not. But we’re pretty optimistic where we sit. And I will remind you, too, that we’ve got 14 different AV partnerships and not only are we expanding with Vaymo that we’re really happy about, but you will see expansions with many of our other autonomous partners in domestic and international markets on the AV side. |
7,145 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Operator: Your next question comes from Doug Anmuth with JPMorgan.
Doug Anmuth: I'm going to stick with AV. Dara, can you just talk more about your goals here in doing fleet ups in AV world and some of the ways that you'll be able to drive some greater efficiencies for AV tech providers? And then maybe you could just talk about San Francisco a little bit, perhaps any impact that you're seeing in that market from Vaymo? And is there anything notable to call out on volume, frequency or loyalty in San Francisco? |
7,146 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: Yes, definitely. So generally, in terms of fleet ops, the background of ops is we have been partnering and working with fleets and building up our fleet operations kind of practices for years and years. Typically, we have about 15% of our global mobility supply hours come from fleets. And this is a supply that’s dedicated to us. So they tend to work longer hours. They were kind of multiple shifts in terms of drivers and the supply is dedicated to us, which is terrific. And we work with these fleets in many countries in the U.S. and Europe as well in Spain, for example, and many other countries as well. So fleet operations is something that we built, for example, we have special tools for fleets to be able to manage our fleet to be able to drive high utilization of their cars based on demand, et cetera. And so we’re really extending this practice to the AV space. Housing, charging, cleaning cars can be expensive, and we think just like their advantages to a platform, a global platform being demand to drive the utilization of these AV fleets, we think there’s also an advantage to a global player establishing fleet operations to take care of kind of the local complex logistics that happens in a more efficient way and we think more cost-effective way for our partners as well. So it’s just another way in which we want to be kind of the best demand and operational local operation platform for AV out there. And we’re really excited to get started with Vaymo, and hopefully, we can expand from there. In terms of San Francisco, we see that Vaymo is on the streets here all the time. And in the areas where Vaymo operates, we do see them have category position in the high single digits or low double digits. We aren’t seeing any effect in terms of our consumers one or the other. The price is generally at a bit of a premium to X. It’s more of a, call it, a comfort electric type of a price out there. And it’s a great product, and we’ve been competing with Lyft. And – in San Frisco [indiscernible], we compete |
7,147 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | price out there. And it’s a great product, and we’ve been competing with Lyft. And – in San Frisco [indiscernible], we compete with Waymo as well. But we’re very happy to kind of extend our partnership with them and really start to build together in cities like Atlanta and Austin. And hopefully, that will be the dominant way forward for that partnership going forward. |
7,148 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Operator: Next question is from Justin Post with Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Justin Post: I guess just go to mobility bookings decelerated 3 points to 24%. I know it's a tougher comp. But anything unusual or anything that surprised you in the quarter? And then the incremental take rates and margins were quite strong in Mobility. How do you think about where you are on those and the drivers of growth there as we go forward?
Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: Yes. Justin, I’ll take the first part of that. So maybe let’s start with sort of the recap of how we did for Q3. So gross bookings at 20% on constant currency. And remember, that’s our fourth quarter now of clocking at least 20% growth. That came from audience and frequency as it has for the last several quarters, audience really driving the majority of that at 13% frequency at fourth. And then with the leverage that we’ve been able to drive the financial leverage, we are able to get EBITDA growing at almost 3x the rate of gross bookings growth. Your comment on sort of where is Mobility headed. Really the – we speak about the trips at the Q4 level, I think, in the prepared remarks, to be similar to what we saw in Q3 with a little bit of deceleration driven by less year-over-year pricing impact is sort of what we’re seeing down the LOB lines as well. So again, you should expect trip activity for Q4 to be sort of in line with what we saw in Q3 with a little bit less benefit from pricing, both you don’t see as much year-on-year increase from insurance in Q4 as well as on the delivery side, you don’t – you see the – some of the benefits of the efforts we’re making to drive affordability impacting basket size. So overall, we still feel kind of this is a large business that continues to grow at a very good rate. And I would say that think of Mobility growing sort of in the low 20% range on a constant currency basis in Q4 and then EBITDA margin probably flattish sequentially.
Operator: Your next question is from Mark Mahaney with Evercore. |
7,149 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Operator: Your next question is from Mark Mahaney with Evercore.
Mark Mahaney: Okay. I'll just double-click two things on the insurance costs. So Dara, just talk about, are those -- where are those in international markets? Is that primarily a U.S. market problem and specific state problem? Or is there -- is that a global challenge, rising insurance costs? And then then let's talk about advertising a little bit too. So that growth is pretty robust. The sustainability -- that's very high growth rate that you're doing 70%, 80%. The sustainability of that? Or as you think about the opportunities and -- particularly on the delivery side, where do you think you are? Are there lead markets where you've got you're at several percentage points of bookings and most of the markets you're well under 1%. Just talk about that path of adoption. |
7,150 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: Thank you, Mark. This is Prashant. I'm going to take insurance and Dara is going to take ads. So insurance is primarily a U.S. phenomenon for us that -- where we provide insurance to our drivers when they are on their way for -- to pick up a rider and then again when the rider is on trip. The -- we talked about this in prior quarters that we've seen pretty steady increase in insurance. And this last quarter was no different. The CPI for motor vehicle insurance in the U.S. was up 16% year-over-year in September, but that is starting to moderate. I think Dara mentioned that earlier on in one of the questions. Remember, it peaked sort of in the low 20s back in the spring. So as we look forward to 2025, I'd say we expect the insurance cost to continue to increase, but at a pretty significantly modulated rate compared to what we've seen over the last 2 years. And as we've said many times, there's a lot of effort that we have to help drive that insurance cost down and really bend the curve that includes the deployment of safety technologies that we're putting in the risk management program we have, which includes sort of the relationships we have with our [indiscernible] driving some of those initiatives where we've actually been able to see success in insurance in a couple of states, Georgia, Texas, for 2 -- as 2 examples. And our our principle has been unchanged on this. We pass along insurance cost increases, and we pass along insurance cost decreases. So as we make progress on insurance, you'll see us continue to pass those benefits on to our riders. Let me pass off to Dara to take your question on advertising. |
7,151 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: Yes, absolutely. So advertising, we’re obviously very, very pleased with the growth of our advertising business. We’ve always said that in Delivery, it can get to 2% plus of gross bookings were in the mid-1%. So we’re right in between 1% and 2% at this point. So we’re making good progress there. And if I were to generally split our advertising business into kind of 4 different categories: one is the CPC kind of bidding for placement for small businesses. That business continues to progress really, really well. We’re able to increase the number of monetizable impressions per user session, so kind of increasing the ad load a little bit with little or no penalty to the user experience because the ads are really targeted. We’re showing high-quality restaurant and high-quality choices to users as well. So our kind of SMB, small medium business, CPC business continues to grow at very, very high rates. Our penetration with enterprise is generally a little bit lower than SMB advertisers, but that is growing quickly as well. And some of the larger enterprises, they’re looking to target different consumers, they’re looking to target different segments of the day, for example, that might be breakfast, that might be lunch, that might be thinner or they’re looking for consumers that are net new or incremental. So kind of the tools that we’re building for enterprises are a bit more sophisticated in terms of tracking, targeting, et cetera. And we’re making really good progress there with our ads team. And then we’re really focused on our sponsored listing product. This is for groceries. And these are CPGs, et cetera, the Cokes and Pepsis of the world who can advertise on our grocery product in order to increase their share in our marketplace. And we’re very, very early in the development of that product. We’re launching about 8 different markets now, again, looking to mature tool set for the enterprise advertisers. And then at the same time, we just have to keep building our grocery business to be bigger and |
7,152 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | for the enterprise advertisers. And then at the same time, we just have to keep building our grocery business to be bigger and to become an absolutely necessary buy for the big brands out there, the big global brands out there. And based on the growth rates that we see in our grocery business and the number of partners that we’re bringing in, we’re quite optimistic that we are getting there. And then the other area that we’re pretty excited about is our mobility advertising. These are our journey ads. We are really kind of restricting that space to very, very high-quality advertisers. Click-through rates are 2x to 3x that of industry averages. So the advertising is getting the attention of the riders. We’re very careful there not to hurt the rider experience, which is – which kind of is as a result of our focus on ad quality. We are – we recently announced a partnership with T-Mobile Advertising Solutions to bring our Journey TV offerings to about 50,000 vehicles across the U.S. So we think that will be another jump start to our mobility advertising solutions as well that we’re quite optimistic about. Ultimately, we think mobility advertising is an opportunity for us to increase margins, but also increase the ability for drivers to earn more with these tablets, for example, in their cars to the extent that it improves driver earnings and their quality of life, we think that’s a terrific thing as well. So very pleased with how the ad team and tech teams are delivering, and we think we are midway along this journey and have plenty of room for growth ahead of us in all 3 areas, whether it’s CPC or sponsor listings or mobility solutions. |
7,153 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Operator: Next question is from Ron Josey with Citi.
Ron Josey: Maybe, Dara, I wanted to stick on the delivery side a little bit here and understand just what's driving the map season frequencies? I think we said in the letter [indiscernible] exceeded $50 million in the quarter, frequency reached all-time highs. And so I just want to understand on the delivery. Can you talk about just how are new maps coming on for restaurants? Or has that evolved a little bit more to newer verticals, just given the investments and awareness around grocery and pretty much everything that Uber has to offer. I guess that's question number one. And then question number two on frequency overall. 25 million Uber One members globally, teen trips up 40%. We'd just love to hear your thoughts on just other initiatives on driving greater frequency across the platform. So 1 is on delivery, two is on overall frequency. |
7,154 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: Yes, absolutely. So on delivery, listen, we’re pleased with the results. It’s another quarter of 17% growth in terms of gross bookings. And listen, on the [indiscernible] side in terms of audience, first of all, delivery is – it’s a big category. I think the growth in the category continues to surprise many, maybe including ourselves. And it is the main line Uber Eats business that is bringing on the new audience, I would say, significantly assisted by mobility as well. We have the unique differentiator in our marketplaces, which is we have our mobility business with an Eats tab right on top of it and also actively cross-promoting users between Mobility And delivery, and increasingly now from Delivery to Mobility as well. So about 1/3 of our new audience comes from a Mobility business, and it’s a lower-cost audience and obviously very much engaged with the platform. But we are continuing to invest in increasing advertising and increasing brand spend all around the world and the message that’s landing with Uber Eats is obviously a message that is resonating, we gain category position as a result of kind of that increasing audience and Delivery in 10 – of our top 10 markets. So more people are hearing about us and it is resulting in category position gains that we’re very happy about. And then for us, in terms of frequency, number 1 is just the quality of service, increasing selection, making sure that on-time rates continue to increase, making sure that unfulfilled or errors in terms of deliveries, not getting what you wanted continues to decrease. So we are continuing to kind of grind if you want to call it that, in terms of customer experience. The better you are, the more people stay with you, and you want to avoid those situations where something happens, something unexpected happens or a poor experience happens, which can cause that consumer to look for alternatives. And then once we have that core experience improved, then the focus is on membership. Members spend 3x more than nonmembers. |
7,155 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | And then once we have that core experience improved, then the focus is on membership. Members spend 3x more than nonmembers. Retention rates are higher for members as well. And with 25 million members, up 70% year-on-year, you can see the momentum as it relates to that part of our business as well. So I think it’s all coming together very well. And you can see it in the – both the top line results and our margins continue to increase, and in terms of our category position improving versus our competitors as well. |
7,156 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Operator: Your next question comes from Nikhil Devnani with Bernstein.
Nikhil Devnani: Thanks for the commentary on capital allocation. It seems like in other areas of the business, whether it's dark stores and delivery or autonomous vehicles, you've opted for more of a partnership approach to say, capital efficient. So I guess, could you just remind us how you think about partnering versus buying your way into a new vertical or a new market? What makes an acquisition a better path in your mind? And where does further expansion and diversification of the Uber platform to adjacent opportunities fit in your priority set right now considering the transition that is happening around the core business with autonomous vehicles? |
7,157 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: Thanks, Nikhil. We're going to do this in 2 parts. I'm just going to do a refresher on how we are thinking about capital allocation to give everyone the opportunity to make sure then I'll let Dara kind of talk about how we do those trade-offs between when partnership makes sense. So just as a reminder to everyone, and I said this at the start of the call, our #1 priority is responsible organic investments aligned with the growth strategy, focused on what's going to drive free cash flow. We've got plenty of opportunity ahead of us. We've talked about on the mobility side, things like [indiscernible] on Delivery. We have our groceries and our direct business. And then we have the terrific [indiscernible] platform, which sort of spans both products. Back in February, we also said liquidity was important to us, and we had a goal of getting to investment grade. We actually got there much faster than we were expecting. In Q3 of this year, we hit IG, which is a great accomplishment for us. And now it really allows us to focus on really the return of that excess capital to shareholders. So we will continue to selectively evaluate M&A, but it's a really high bar, and it's going to have to be both strategic value and financially accretive. I think Foodpanda is a terrific example of how we think about that, where it was a clear win both strategically where Taiwan is such a great market for Uber Eats given its high frequency and great membership coverage. And then financially, the deal is very accretive with the likelihood that we'll get an incremental $150 million in EBITDA pretty shortly after we close. So beyond that, get our capital back to shareholders. And again, I made this point in the opening, but I want to restate it. The repo program is the primary vehicle on that. And now we feel pretty good that we're going to be at a share count reduction in 2025. So having said that, I'll pass back to Dara now to get into when do partnerships make sense. |
7,158 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: Yes. So generally, when we look at partner versus acquisitions, et cetera, or whether we want to actively get into an area, really, we ask ourselves: one is, can we really get into an area with a proper focus? Is it substantially related to the core? And then second is like can we add value? And the example of [indiscernible], for example, we just concluded when we looked at that segment, there are millions of retailers out there. It is all they do. And we, as a tech-first company, couldn’t add a bunch of value to what these retailers are doing, and we’d rather partner with them to extend their reach and then to complement their services in certain segments, for example, fulfilling for them, our direct business that allows some of these retailers to fulfill whatever product that they’re serving like a Walmart or an Apple. So if we can’t uniquely add value, if it can’t be a core focus of the company we’ll look to partner [indiscernible] for example of autonomous, we were in that business, but it wasn’t [indiscernible] of the world where autonomous is all we do, and we can bring them the complement, which is our demand and our operations, local operations, which allows them to monetize the substantial investments that they are making. In terms of adjacencies and how we look at them, we will typically – because of the power of the platform, we will typically experiment with different adjacencies. We’ve – on delivery, obviously, we started with food. We’ve gone into grocery. You’re going to see us getting deeper into any and all kinds of local retail as well. And with mobility, we started with cars, and we’re going on 2-wheelers and 3-wheelers and buses and trains, et cetera, and we’ll continue to kind of test out some of these adjacencies. Typically, we look for behaviors that are frequent, meaning you can get multiple interactions per month, and also can benefit from our expertise in terms of real-time local logistics as well. Our ability to match and price based on inventory on a given day that |
7,159 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | expertise in terms of real-time local logistics as well. Our ability to match and price based on inventory on a given day that can change substantially from 9 a.m. to noon to 8 p.m. when we’re pricing out our service, unlike many like traditional retailers, we don’t even know what our inventory is. So we have to kind of do a scan of our real-time inventory in every market that we operate. It makes it a very, very challenging, but really interesting technical problem to be able to scan that inventory quick enough and then price that both on the demand side and the supply side. So where there are circumstances where we can bring value to them and where the customer interaction tends to be highly frequent or can take advantage of our local logistics and pricing and matching capability, that’s where we’ll look to act. And first, typically, we like to build things organically. We’ve built a ton of businesses. Eats was built organically here. So building organically as part of the DNA of this company. And then if we see something really interesting, we will look at acquisitions. But again, like Prashanth said, we will be very disciplined in terms of those acquisitions because the bar for return on investment is quite high at our shop right now. |
7,160 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Operator: The next question is from Ross Sandler with Barclays.
Ross Sandler: Just going back to the autonomous questions. So I guess on the Vaymo partnership, why only 2 cities? Why not something much broader? Is that an option in the future? And then you guys are an investor in Wave. Could you talk about how you see the second tier of the Robotaxi market behind Vaymo and Tesla evolving? When do you see that next wave of companies and fleets conceivably being on the road and on Uber specifically? |
7,161 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: Yes, Ross, in terms of the two cities, really what you want to get is the proper liquidity in a city anytime that you launch. And with Vaymo as well and many other AV players, there's a need to kind of map different cities and map both originations and destinations. So there's an investment that goes into launching these cities. So it doesn't make sense to getting into 20 or 30 cities in kind of a thin. Way you want to go into a city with the proper investment in your depots, in your infrastructure, in your mapping, et cetera, so that you start getting a return on capital. And Vaymo and ourselves thought that these 2 cities are very attractive cities to launch it. And hopefully, we can go from there. But really, the focus right now is to make sure that Austin and Atlanta work the way that we believe that they will. In terms of other players out there, it's really hard to generalize. I think that Vaymo is clearly the leader in the industry. but there are many other players who are developing this technology. And these cars are live in many cities around the world, certainly in China as well. And so you will see deployments of other autonomous partners on the Uber network, so to speak, outside the U.S. coming up in '25. And I think that the autonomous kind of ecosystem will continue to expand across many different partners because the potential of the market, both in terms of saving a bunch of lives with safer drivers out there, but the potential in terms of extending mobility and making available to many, many more people and -- at a reasonable price is just so significant that many players are going to go after that opportunity. And I think we've shown with all of our partnerships that we are by far the best partner in terms of driving utilization and working locally with some of these partners. So stay tuned, you're going to see more launches coming up.
Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: Sara, we’ll take our final question now. |
7,162 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: Sara, we’ll take our final question now.
Operator: Your final question comes from the line of Benjamin Black with Deutsche Bank.
Benjamin Black: Can you just talk a little bit about the broader consumer landscape, how favorable is the state of the macro environment for you in some of your larger markets? What proof points or KPIs do you guys track that give you confidence that it's not deteriorating. And then the second one is on Uber Direct. Do you need to supplement that business with some incremental investments to drive deeper penetration? And in terms of your Darden deal, it's exclusive? Is that sort of the right way to think about the direction of travel for the structure of future partnerships? |
7,163 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: Yes. So I think generally, consumer demand continues to be strong. especially on services. Spend on services still isn't where [indiscernible]. So I think all service players travel, for example, Booking.com, I think reported last night, pretty strong results. So all kind of services providers are enjoying this. And if you look for us, in our audience is an all-time pie, frequency is at an all-time high, our consumer retention is up globally year-on-year in both Mobility and Delivery similar to the past couple of quarters as well. We're not seeing any signs of trade down in Delivery. It's something that we look at. So eaters are ordering more from kind of the $2 bucket versus the the $1 bucket in terms of our own ratings and in all top markets. So it looks like the consumer is strong. And when you look at U.S. and Mobility, gross bookings in the U.S., for example, they grew 17%, which is a very solid number. And then International actually grew faster than that. So international markets continue to be very, very strong, which is something that we are quite happy about. And then we continue to see very strong spend on the corporate side as well. U4B growth rates are very strong. 50% constant currency growth as we continue to penetrate into new accounts, but actually existing accounts continue to grow as well, and about 50% of our U4B business is premium, which is kind of black and comfort, et cetera. We're not seeing any signs of trade down there. So for now, the consumer -- all the consumer signs are strong, and we're certainly hoping that they stay that way. And then in terms of Direct, we continue to invest aggressively in Direct actually. You see the partners -- the partnerships with Darden. And some of the partnerships that we have are exclusive and some are not exclusive. It really depends. It's hard to generalize. There are some players who want multiple partners. I think one of the benefits that we bring in the direct business that we are global in nature. So one partner, especially |
7,164 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | I think one of the benefits that we bring in the direct business that we are global in nature. So one partner, especially global brands, can partner with us and we can integrate into their tech ecosystem and we can deliver for them in New York, and we can deliver for them in any international -- in Tokyo as well. And there are very few -- there's no one else who really has the global scope that we do. But as it relates to Direct, we're actively increasing our engineering headcount there and continuing to sign up more partnerships and also deepen our capabilities in terms of the services that we offer our partnerships. It's one of the fastest-growing parts of our business. And we think the extension of direct beyond just same-day delivery into kind of more fundamental parts of the fulfillment ecosystem as a real potential opportunity for us going forward. So I think that's it. Thank you, everyone, for joining. A huge thank you to the Uber team for all of the efforts that undergird kind of what Prashant and I and Deepa report to the Street. Another good quarter, and we're looking forward to closing out 2024 with a strong Q4. And I think for short, we're going to be talking on some of the investors in a couple |
7,165 | UBER | 3 | 2,024 | 2024-10-31 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: Yes. Thank you, Dara. We're going to be in Toronto, Miami, Boston and San Francisco over the next couple of weeks. So if that corresponds with anyone's interest, please reach out to depot. We'd love to see you.
Dara Khosrowshahi: All right. Thanks, everyone.
Operator: This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect. |
7,166 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Operator: Thank you and welcome to the Uber Q2 2024 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers’ remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, please press star, one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to turn the conference over to Deepa Subramanian, Vice President, Investor Relations and Corporate Finance. Please go ahead.
Deepa Subramanian: Thank you Operator. Thank you for joining us today, and welcome to Uber’s second quarter 2024 earnings presentation. On the call today, we have Uber CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, and CFO Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah. During today’s call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures are included in the press release, supplemental slides, and our filings with the SEC, each of which is posted to investor.uber.com. Certain statements in this presentation and on this call are forward-looking statements. You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements and we do not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements we make today, except as required by law. For more information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements, please refer to the press release we issued today, as well as the risks and uncertainties described in our most recent Form 10-K and in other filings made with the SEC. We published a quarterly earnings press release, prepared remarks, and supplemental slides to our Investor Relations website earlier today and we ask you to review those documents, if you haven’t already. We will open the call to questions following brief opening remarks from Dara. With that, let me hand it over to Dara. |
7,167 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: Thanks Deepa. Q2 was another record quarter for Uber and further demonstrated our ability to deliver profitable growth at scale. Gross bookings grew 21% on a constant currency basis, consistent with trip growth. Our audience expanded 14% while frequency grew 6%, supported by 7.4 million drivers and couriers globally. At the same time, adjusted EBITDA grew 71% year-on-year and we generated record quarterly GAAP operating income. These are super strong results that we’re proud of, but I also understand there are two big questions out there that I want to address before we head into Q&A. First, the strength of the consumer and how Uber will perform in a recession. Based on what we’re seeing today, the Uber consumer is in great shape. Our audience is bigger than ever and using our services more frequently than ever. While our consumers tend to be higher income, we’re not seeing any softness or trading down across any income cohort. Were the current macroeconomic fears to materialize, we’re confident that Uber can perform well because of the countercyclical nature of our platform. On the mobility side, more driver supply brings down prices for riders and improves reliability, and on the delivery side, merchants are investing in performance channels like ours for growth, improving selection and affordability for consumers. In fact, in Q2 the number of first-time consumers on Uber Eats in the U.S. was higher than at any point over the past five quarters. It’s clear that delivery is much more habitual than many assumed, made even more so by our Uber One membership, which now covers 50% of delivery gross bookings. We’ll continue to drive consistent top line growth while expanding GAAP operating income. Our track record of making and then exceeding our commitments should give investors confidence that we’ve built the capital discipline and operational muscle to perform well in any scenario. Second, autonomous - put simply, Uber is uniquely positioned to offer tremendous value for AV players looking to |
7,168 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | any scenario. Second, autonomous - put simply, Uber is uniquely positioned to offer tremendous value for AV players looking to deploy their technology at scale. While the operation of a ride hail network may seem simple, our technology obscures a huge amount of complexity. We support roughly one million trips per hour and our average ETA globally is approximately four minutes. That’s possible because of marketplace tech that makes over 10 million predictions per second, and more mundanely, we handled more than 25 million lost items in just last year alone. We also know that a key factor in AV commercialization will be asset utilization. AV players will need to ensure that their expensive assets are being used as close to 24 hours a day as possible while also managing the daily and weekly peaks and valleys of ride hail activity. Uber can provide enormous demand without AV players needing to invest capital towards acquiring customers or building the marketplace tech that delivers reliability at the standard that consumers have come to expect. That’s all to say that Uber will be an indispensable partner for AV players of all sorts. We’re in late stage discussions with additional global AV players to join our platform and will have more announcements in the coming weeks and months. Thanks to the Uber team for another great quarter. With that, Operator, let’s open the call for questions. |
7,169 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Operator: Thank you. [Operator instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Brian Nowak with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.
Brian Nowak: Thanks for taking my questions. I have two, the first one is on AV. Dara, I appreciate the color, and even the extra color in the press release. My question is, is there any more detail on what you’re seeing in Arizona around incrementality of rides from the partnership? How do we think about sort of the relative unit economics, and philosophically, what is your strategy of reinvesting dollars to sort of drive more AV growth versus delivering profitability? Then the second one on mobility specifically, can you talk to us just a little bit on what you’re seeing on mobility MAPC versus frequency growth drivers, just [indiscernible] or break apart what’s driving that growth in the quarter for mobility? Thanks. |
7,170 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: Sure, absolutely Brian, thanks for the question. I don’t want to speak specifically to Arizona because obviously we have Waymo as a partner there, and I want to hold confidentiality, etc. as any partner should. But when we look more broadly at our operations with the various AV players that we see, what we do see is that the utilization that these AV players are able to develop on our network is significantly higher than the utilization we believe that they’re able to run out without [indiscernible] basis, so 3P utilization is significantly higher than 1P utilization. If you think about the role of the marketplace, the role of the marketplace is to drive utilization of fixed assets. I mean, in the end, it’s why a McDonald’s or a Starbucks or even Dominos now works with us - they have direct channels to consumers, but they also work through the marketplace to bring more demand to their stores, so to speak, and we think the same will be true of AV players, which is as long as we’re able to drive higher utilization and the utilization that we drive, the incrementality we think significantly exceeds the take rate that we will charge on average for mobility. Not including insurance costs, our global take rate is around 20%, so you’d have to drive 25% increasing utilization. We believe that those utilization numbers are possible and we think that we can exceed those kinds of utilization numbers. Right now, the economics and the math are definitely working. I think the additional benefit that we bring to these players is we have a dynamic dispatch model that can determine what are the pick-ups and drop-offs that an autonomous player can effectively play with - you know, the pick-up point is easy, it’s within a block, same thing with the drop-off points, and then what are the circumstances when we should dispatch a human for a particular pick-up or a drop-off, if the route is complex or the pick-up or drop-off has some special circumstances. We’re able to essentially allow autonomous players to |
7,171 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | is complex or the pick-up or drop-off has some special circumstances. We’re able to essentially allow autonomous players to dispatch in situations where we know that they will succeed, so all in all the early data is quite encouraging, and as I said, we’ve had lots of discussions with other players out there. We don’t think this will be a win or take all market, and we think that we will continue to have the most liquid and largest marketplace that will be--that will have humans and AV players as part of it during this pretty long hybrid period, as autonomous is development and regulators are trying to figure out exactly how to regulate it. Prashanth, do you want to take the second one? |
7,172 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: I will, thanks Dara. I think, Brian, your question was on mobility growth, so maybe I’ll start with just restating how we did for Q2 and our outlook for Q3. For Q2, the results that we printed, if you do it at a constant currency, very strong at 27% year-over-year growth. For Q3, we’re looking for sort of a repeat in that mid-20s range, again on a constant currency basis. But when you dig into why do we have such confidence in the mobility business, I would take you back to the framework we talked about in February, that mobility over the three years that we gave you should be growing at the mid-teens or better, and that’s coming from a couple items. On the user side, we still believe that we have a pretty massive TAM that we can go after. We’re continuing to drive product innovation, and we talked about a couple of those at Go Get earlier this year, and we’re continuing to find new demographics in areas to continue to expand in. Maybe one data point on TAM that I think is helpful for folks is our monthly penetration of consumers, and we define that as folks who are over 18 years, is less than 20% across our top 10 countries, so a lot of room to run there. Another key driver will be frequency, which I think folks understand to be how our monthly active--how many times our monthly actives engage with the platform. We are launching new products, continuing to improve reliability so that when you call for an Uber, we’re able to get you one at a time that you’re looking for, and of course the benefits of membership. Only about half of our riders take one to two trips per month, so again plenty of upside there to continue to drive this as a more frequent daily use case. |
7,173 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: Then Brian, I think you had asked about our strategy to reinvest to drive, let’s say, AV growth versus profits. Generally we are able to lean into our newer products, so for example if you look at moto, which are two wheelers in Latin America and a number of developing countries, if you look at our shared product, UberX Share, where we get more than one passenger in a vehicle, or even taxis, those newer products are growing faster than the base business and their margins are substantially lower than the base business, but we’re able to-- as we scale, we’re able to leverage our cost base, our technology improvements in terms of targeting, in terms of CPT all allow us to have a profit envelope to be able to be reinvest into our newer products - AV is one of those new products, while overall increasing profit margins. This is something that we’ve been doing for years, and we think AV will be part of the same equation. I don’t--you know, AV is not something that we’re going to look to make substantial profits from over the next five to 10 years, and that’s just fine because we’ll be able to build a lot of liquidity in the marketplace to continue on the path that we have been operating in over the past five years.
Brian Nowak: Great, thank you both.
Dara Khosrowshahi: You’re welcome. Next question?
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Doug Anmuth with JP Morgan. Your line is open.
Doug Anmuth: Thanks so much for taking the questions. Dara, can you just talk more about the importance of the BYD partnership as you bring new EVs into global markets, and then perhaps how that can tie into AV over time? Then Prashanth, just if you could talk more about the drivers of delivery profitability - good upside there in the quarter, and what gives you the confidence on the clear path to EBITDA profit in grocery and retail as well? Thank you. |
7,174 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: Yes, absolutely Doug. I’ll start with BYD. The electrification of our fleet is an incredibly important initiative for us. We are--if you look at Uber, Uber drivers are switching over to electric at five times the speed that normal drivers are, and if there’s any driver that you want to switch over to EVs, it’s an Uber driver because Uber drivers also drive around five times the miles of a regular driver as well, so it’s a very targeted segment that we’re going after and we’re hoping that governments can help us go after as well. The number one reason why some drivers hesitate to move over to EVs is affordability, and the fact is that BYD, when you look at cost and quality, BYD is really second to none in terms of any manufacturer out there. We’re very, very excited with the partnership. We are--we believe we’re going to bring over 100,000 new BYD EVs onto the Uber platform across some of our most important global markets out there, and we’ve always talked about climate being a team sport, we are going to be leaders in terms of climate change, and having BYD as a partner is just terrific to see. More recently, BYD has committed to very, very significant investments in the AV space, and judging from what they have accomplished in the EV space, I would not--I would make a bet on them in AV as well. But the investment that they’re making in AV is in the billions and we’re very much looking forward to partnering with them on both EVs and AVs. Prashanth? |
7,175 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: Yes, so I think your question was on delivery profitability. Although we don’t--we don’t want to draw attention to incremental margins, we did have a pretty terrific quarter for incremental margins in delivery - 10% for the second quarter, so putting a little context around that. We are clearly seeing the benefits of scale as it runs through the delivery business and we still have many levers that we’re continuing to tune to drive that profitability in delivery. That includes some incredible tech that the team has built that continues to drive down the cost per transaction--cost per trip in terms of operational improvements. We’ve got great improvements in advertising - I think we mentioned in the prepared remarks that’s now running in excess of a billion dollars on a run rate basis, and continuing to find ways, both operationally and with tech, to reduce some of our other costs like refunds and appeasements, which are still a bit of a drag on the delivery segment. You know, the fact that we were able to grow delivery profitability while continuing to have very strong growth in grocery really is a good indicator of how much strong growth we’re seeing in that profitability. I think delivery EBITDA was up by 25 basis points sequentially, and that is despite grocery growing at a substantially faster rate than delivery. In grocery profitability, it’s what we’ve talked about in the past - you know, using the power of the platform, we can bring down the customer acquisition cost and drive those cost efficiencies. We’ve got 15% of our Eats customers are now using grocery - that’s up about 200 basis points year-over-year as of middle of the year, and we’re seeing retention on grocery also improving. I mentioned the ads revenue, and then also starting--given that our selection’s improving, we’re also driving down consumer promotions and continuing to add more and more merchants onto the platform - we mentioned Costco, and I think in the press release or prepared remarks, we also mentioned a |
7,176 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | merchants onto the platform - we mentioned Costco, and I think in the press release or prepared remarks, we also mentioned a couple other grocers. All in all, things are on track to where we gave you in our three-year model, and grocery is continuing to be a strong story for our delivery business. |
7,177 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: Just one very encouraging trend on grocery and retail is that ad spend on grocery and retail has more than tripled on a year-on-year basis - obviously that’s very high margin product, and we are continuing to expand our CPG product now into a bunch of new countries, so the momentum there is terrific to see.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.
Eric Sheridan: Thanks so much for taking the questions. Maybe two, if I could, coming back to the delivery business. Building on the last set of comments, how do you think about the potential longer term for increased utility, increased frequency as you layer more supply into the delivery network, and what you continue to learn about the relationship of evolving the experience for consumers and what it means for platform growth over a longer period of time? Then also on the delivery side, we’ve seen a lot of market consolidation and market rationalization in some of the countries around the globe. How do you think about the asset portfolio on delivery and your current marketing positioning against some of those industry dynamics you’re seeing on the capital side? Thanks so much. |
7,178 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: Yes Eric, so what we’re seeing in terms of delivery is the long term growth is incredibly promising, and especially our ability to expand into the adjacent category of grocery and retail. The grocery and retail TAM is actually bigger than the online food delivery TAM, so not only do we believe we’ve got a long runway in online food delivery but we’re just getting started as it relates to grocery and retail. We now have 1.1 million merchants on the platform - that’s up 13%. Our merchant penetration in most countries still is very low, well under 50%, and every time we add a merchant, because we have more diversity of choice, average conversion tends to improve for consumers who are kind of searching for their favorite restaurant or favorite dessert place, and each merchant gives us actually another item to market against as it relates to search engine optimization or search engine marketing in third party channels as well. So new merchants add conversion, choice, and actually are another item to market against, and we’re a very, very long way in terms of full merchant penetration in the marketplace. It all results in either retention being up globally in every single mega region just in June on a year-on-year basis, so right now we believe there’s a very, very long runway for growth. The more consumers use our products in a multi-product way, whether it’s a mobility user using delivery or a delivery user buying from grocery and retail, the more they transact on the platform, multi-product consumers spend three times more than single product consumers, and for us, the more products we add to the marketplace, the more this benefit adds onto it, and then on top of that, you add our membership product as well, which is now over 50% of bookings. The volumes are strong, we are not having to buy our way into strong volumes, we’re kind of earning our way into strong volumes, and I think the fundamentals are going to be there for some time to come. In terms of our portfolio, we had made the strategic |
7,179 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | and I think the fundamentals are going to be there for some time to come. In terms of our portfolio, we had made the strategic decision a few years ago, probably three or four years ago to exit markets that we didn’t think we could either be the number one or number two, and if we’re the number two, the ability to move to a number one position. We’ve gained category position in delivery in every one of our top 10 markets on a year-on-year basis. It’s a function of the great execution of our operations team, the technology that we’re shipping, and then the power of the platform. There’s no other global player who operates both in mobility and delivery or has as broad a platform as we do, so we’re very happy with our portfolio, so to speak, and I think the results speak for themselves. |
7,180 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: Eric, as someone who’s been in the business coming up now on my one-year anniversary soon, I’m surprised--I was surprised to learn how sticky the food delivery business is. It is very habitual, and we’ve got great data that shows that stickiness is improving. I think I looked back at five, six quarters of data, and it gets better every quarter in terms of either retention, so there’s clearly the trajectory to follow what we’re seeing in mobility.
Eric Sheridan: Appreciate it, thank you.
Dara Khosrowshahi: You’re welcome. Next question?
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Justin Post with Bank of America. Your line is open.
Justin Post: Thank you. I wonder if you could revisit the consumer downturn scenario. What would you expect to happen for mobility if we do have a recession or a bigger downturn as far as maybe trade down or looking for lower priced rides, the impact on bookings and profitability? Then Prashanth, maybe you could talk about--it looks like you’ve turned the corner on independent contract deals in Massachusetts and other areas. What happens to your cost when you sign those deals, and can you cover it with higher fees? What are the business model impacts of signing those deals? Thank you. |
7,181 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: Yes Justin, in terms of a consumer downturn scenario on mobility, we see these circumstances in a number of markets - LatAm has been through a bunch of cyclical trends, etc., and usually a downturn, the leading indicator of a downturn is a weak job market. We might be seeing it in some of the western markets, we might not - it’s very difficult to tell, but when there is a weaker job market, typically our driver supply on the mobility side significantly improves. We’re a very, very flexible work platform, average earnings per utilized hour for drivers in the U.S., for example, is $33 per utilized hour, so it’s highly flexible and the earnings per utilized hour are strong. Typically what we see is improvement in driver supply. As driver supply improves, surge comes down, ETAs improve, the service itself becomes more compelling, and as a result volumes typically turn out to be quite sticky. In addition to those trends, we are actively investing in affordability, right - the membership program essentially brings prices down for both mobility and delivery, and we’re investing in products such as two-wheelers and three-wheelers and UberX Share, all of whom provide discounts of, let’s say, 25% to 50% of, let’s say, the price of an UberX as well. We think that we can thrive in upturns and downturns, and I think that the team has proven that they have execution capability to be able to perform in any kind of market. Listen - we’re watching trends very, very closely and I do believe we’ll be able to adjust as needed. Prashanth, do you want to talk about Massachusetts? |
7,182 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: Yes, I will. Justin, maybe I’ll also just start by reminding folks that we have three different broad models on how we go to market in our operating framework for folks. We have the traditional independent contractor, which is how most people think of Uber, and that is the model that the company was largely built on. Then over time, we’ve adapted to now the IC-plus model, which is what you referred to for Massachusetts, and that’s where we enter into agreements to provide some level of benefits, and then there are still some countries that we use a fleet model, where an independent company sort of handles the actual execution on the ground, and we serve as feeding them the global--or the in-country demand or the in-city demand. Specifically in Massachusetts, we reached a deal with the Attorney General that settled on a set of standards for earners that includes how we measure or how we define time on the platform, certain healthcare, family and medical leave benefits as well. As a consequence for that, the Attorney General dropped their action against Uber and we’re no longer in pursuit of a ballot issue in Massachusetts, like we had very successfully done in California. The consequence of that is we will factor that into our operating model in Massachusetts, but as we’ve said back in February at our investor day, we still have plenty of runway to focus on operational costs, so while this will be built into the cost structure that we push to the market, we continue to believe that there is plenty of runway ahead for us to continue to drive down our operating costs through the support costs and payments and a variety of other measures, that we continue to sort of grind out those basis points that will continue to make Uber an affordable option for all.
Justin Post: Great, thank you.
Dara Khosrowshahi: You’re welcome. Next question, Operator?
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Nikhil Devnani with Bernstein. Your line is open. |
7,183 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Nikhil Devnani with Bernstein. Your line is open.
Nikhil Devnani: Hi, thanks for taking my question. Dara, I wanted to ask a two-parter on autonomous vehicles. First, can you help us understand how much of the ride share demand takes place during peak hours, in mornings and evenings? I would imagine that utilization math around the peak is really at the core of your value prop to partners. Then second, the partnership model makes a lot of sense to us for both sides, but there is a world where providers choose not to partner, they choose to compete more directly, so my second question is around, I guess, what the Plan B is for Uber in the event the leading players choose not to extend partnerships or engage in partnerships? How do you navigate that scenario? Thank you. |
7,184 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: Yes, absolutely. In terms of peak and trough, while we haven’t disclosed the numbers, there are very, very significant peaks during rush hour both ways, obviously in the mornings and going home, during after-hours drinks, etc. We are able to shape demand and supply--actually, demand through surge when we need to, and supply, obviously positioning our drivers through incentives either on a temporal basis or on a geographic basis, if there’s a concert going on, etc. The good news there is that through our incentive structure, essentially those are variable costs for us. We will pay more during those peak periods and then when we don’t need supply, we can take incentives out, so we have a model where essentially we’re able to shape supply to match demand in a variable basis. I think that in an AV world, the car is there at all times, so you kind of have to pay the overhead for the car and the amortization of the car during all periods, so we think kind of hybrid network that can--that consists of both humans and robots can handle the peaks and valleys much more effectively than a pure play network. In terms of AV partnerships, etc., I would tell you, Nikhil, that based on the conversations that we’re having, we are highly, highly confident of being able to acquire AV content, if you want to call it that, on a global basis. The fact is this is not turning out to be a winner take all market - originally, I think that was the concept why Uber wanted to develop the technology itself, but every single OEM is investing in some L2 or L3 technology. If you look at some of the newer tech coming in terms of imitation learning technologies that have taken the imagination of folks through LOMs, that same technology, we believe can potentially introduce a new wave of AV through imitation learning at substantially lower capital costs that was necessary historically, so we think there are going to be many, many AV providers. If there are many, many AV providers, the marketplace--and our marketplace is by far |
7,185 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | are going to be many, many AV providers. If there are many, many AV providers, the marketplace--and our marketplace is by far the largest marketplace, global marketplace both for mobility, delivery, and then freight as well, the marketplace will have a very, very strong position. At this point, we don’t see any signal that a Plan B will be necessary. Also, take note that we have investments, strategic investments in a number of AV players - Aurora, we’re working with Waymo, for example, and there are other investments that we have in AV players to make sure that Plan A is the right plan going forward. So far, I’d say so good, and as I mentioned in my remarks, we will have more partnerships to announce in the next weeks and months, and I think the market will see--you’ll see that Plan B isn’t necessary. |
7,186 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Nikhil Devnani: Thanks Dara.
Dara Khosrowshahi: You’re very welcome. Next question, Operator?
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of John Colatuoni with Jefferies. Your line is open.
John Colatuoni: Great, thanks for taking my questions. Given the continued progress on mobility frequency, I was curious if we could go back to some disclosure you provided about a year ago, showing pre-COVID cohorts in the U.S. and Canada had lower frequency than more recent cohorts. How has mobility usage progressed across cohorts over the past year, and what does that progression tell you about the opportunity to keep driving frequency higher through multi-product adoption? Second, the $1 billion in advertising run rate suggests over 50% growth, which is really strong but a bit of a deceleration from more like 80% exiting last year. Talk about how restaurants are balancing investments in sponsored listings versus merchant-funded offerings, which you mentioned grew over 70% year-on-year in the quarter. Thanks.
Dara Khosrowshahi: John, in terms of mobility frequency, while we’re not going to disclose specifically what frequency looks like, I would say that when we look at lower cost products, when you look at UberX Share, hailables, two-wheelers, three-wheelers, the frequency of some of the newer products is significantly higher than the frequency of, call it the X product, etc. When you look at the overall frequency numbers for both mobility and delivery, they’re up on a year-on-year basis. It is absolutely helped by multi-product usage, it is absolutely helped by membership as well, so whether you look at cohorts, whether you look at new customers, high income, low income, the frequency numbers for us in both mobility and delivery are very, very constructive. You want to talk about ads, Prashanth? |
7,187 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: Sure. I think the question--your question, John, again was on merchant-funded offers, or offers in general, how are we seeing that have an impact for the business. I would tell you to think about it in two elements. First, as we’re able to drive, and we see very strong cooperation from merchants in using merchant-funded offers to drive their demand, it is actually being a very helpful way for them to address their need, to attack the affordability question that folks are asking, so that can come through a variety of different things that they’re putting onto the platform - it could be a buy one, get one, it could be if you spend a certain amount, you get a certain percentage off. We’re seeing extremely strong growth in the use of merchant-funded offers and the tech that we have is allowing them to be quite creative in how they want to apply that and when. I think that’s something that’s quite unique to us, and as a result of that, we are seeing very good support of their business growth. In a time when I think there is more macro concerns around what’s happening with some of the large enterprise customers, we are seeing our SMBs really lean in more and are seeing strong growth in this. I’d also say that when we look at the category levels that folks are shopping at on the merchant side, we’re continuing to see folks shopping at what we would have categorized as a more expensive or, I think it’s a two dollar sign category versus the single dollar sign, so we’re again seeing folks not trading down at SMBs because some of that is being supported by the RFO or the restaurant-funded offers that we are enabling them to support. |
7,188 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: Then just on the sponsored listings part of the business, the growth continues pretty significantly. We’re a bit over 1% of delivery gross bookings through advertising, we had a target of 2%-plus. We think that target is certainly achievable, and actually for grocery and retail, we think that the number can be well over 2% based on what we see in terms of competitors, what we see in terms of what Amazon is doing. The focus for us with sponsored listings right now is increasing the number of monetizable impressions per user session through introducing new ad formats and placements, and really increasing the monetization of search in a smart way that doesn’t hurt the core consumer experience, so we have holdout to make sure that advertising is a complement to our eater experience and at the same time is a targeted way for merchants to reach their audience. If you think about sponsored listings, sponsored listings tend to improve audience for a particular merchant, and then merchant-funded offers, because of the price nature of those offers, tends to improve conversion as well. For Uber profitability, the sponsored listings business is more profitable for Uber but we think merchant-funded offers are a very important strategic part of our drive to improve the affordability of the overall marketplace, and increasingly we’re working with merchants to be able to move money from sponsored listings to merchant-funded offers in a back and forth and a targeted way to achieve what their goals are. The team is doing a great job. We continue to invest in our sales team, and the technical teams continue to ship some pretty impressive product out there.
Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: Let me give you one metric we haven’t shared before, and that is globally, restaurant-funded offers or merchant-funded offers have grown 70% year-over-year.
John Colatuoni: Thank you both.
Dara Khosrowshahi: All right, can we get the next question? Thank you. |
7,189 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | John Colatuoni: Thank you both.
Dara Khosrowshahi: All right, can we get the next question? Thank you.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Ross Sandler with Barclays. Your line is open.
Ross Sandler: Hey guys, one more follow-up on ads. With talk about getting to 1.6% of gross bookings for ride hail ads, so I know we talk about delivery ads quite a bit, but what’s the status of your ride hail side advertising business of late? Then the letter mentioned the Instacart initial read. Can you provide a little bit more color on what you’re seeing thus far from the Instacart partnership? Thank you. |
7,190 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: Yes, absolutely. For mobility ads, we haven’t introduced a target in terms of the percentage of gross bookings. We are very, very sensitive to the fact that people come to Uber looking for a ride first, and to the extent that we introduce them to some of the premium brands that are advertising with us, we want to make sure that that experience is an excellent experience for the rider and also an excellent experience for the advertiser. It’s resulting in some very strong ad engagement from riders - click-through rates are over 2.5% compared to industry averages that are less than 1%, so I think for us, the focus is more on quality versus quantity, and I think that we’ll continue that focus going forward. The contribution of advertising is very, very positive in terms of newer ad formats that we are introducing, improving targeting capabilities, and then also investments in measurement and attribution for our ad partners, so we’re very, very happy with the progress here, but I don’t want to put a percent target because the experience of the rider comes first. In terms of Instacart and the trends there, we’re very encouraged by the trends there. We talked about Instacart baskets being 20% higher than our base basket sizes, and we’re seeing the demand come from a lot of suburban markets - you know, it kind of matches the Instacart geographic penetration, so we do think that the incrementality of the volume from Instacart is quite strong, and I’d say so far the partnership has been an excellent one.
Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: Maybe just a reminder to folks, we only went live in the second quarter of ’24, where Uber Eats is live on the Instacart app, so it’s still early days. All right, can we take our final question?
Dara Khosrowshahi: Yes, let’s do it.
Operator: Your final question comes from the line of Mark Mahaney with Evercore. Your line is open. |
7,191 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Operator: Your final question comes from the line of Mark Mahaney with Evercore. Your line is open.
Mark Mahaney: Okay, thanks. Two questions please. On the TAM comment, Prashanth, that you made earlier, I think you said in your top 10 markets, less than 20% penetration. My recall is that about a year ago, you’d said it was a little under 10%, so you’ve had nice growth there. Are there particular markets where you could--like, what are you lead markets, like how high have you seen that penetration go? I assume that you’re going to be able to go higher than 20%, but any clues you’ve seen in the markets that you’ve been in, that tell you how high that could go would be helpful. Then could you also talk overall about subsidies and incentives for drivers and consumers and where those are now, and is this something that’s kind of a flat line expense going forward? Is there more leverage as a percentage of bookings, or even in absolute dollars, how do you think about those incentives and subsidies going forward? Thanks a lot. |
7,192 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: Yes, thanks for the question. I think a good frame of reference, or an example to help you with that TAM, if the United States was to move to the TAM penetration that we are seeing in the U.K., that’s worth another $13 billion in gross bookings, so call it 8% or so of our current run rate, just by moving the U.S. to the U.K. We know the opportunity is there. Brazil, I think is another great example where we’re seeing really explosive growth. The frequency in Brazil is a really impressive number that also I think is a great metric for how we have confidence as we continue to feed more markets and continue to expand our mobility products’ availability, reliability into more geographies. That’s going to continue to provide runway, and that sort of links into your second question, which is as we think about balancing supply and demand, I would say the overall sentiment at a global level today is that supply is in a better position than it has historically been. That may not be true in all markets, but at a global level, it is. What that allows us to do is to pivot those incentive dollars into driving demand, and one of the challenges, I think as the leadership team at Uber faces is we have so many areas that we could pivot those dollars into, and they greatly exceed our ability to fund within our financial framework that we gave you, so much of the time is spent on capital allocation to ensure that we are both making decisions that are right for the near term in terms of continuing to make sure the market is liquid, but also providing the right incentives that we need to continue to fund future growth products. I think our Teams product, as an example, which is one that we’ve launched, and I may ask Deepa to help me here with the metric, I think Teams’ user base is up--was it up 100% Deepa, am I remembering the number right? Yes, up 100%, and that’s a relatively new product that we’ve launched but that takes some investment to increase awareness about the product, but once you’ve done |
7,193 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | new product that we’ve launched but that takes some investment to increase awareness about the product, but once you’ve done that--sorry, it’s trips, trips that were up, so those are the trade-offs, I think that we continue to make a decision on. This quarter, we opened up Hungary--sorry, we opened up Luxembourg, and last quarter we opened up Hungary, so we’re continuing to find new geographies as well as expanding in existing countries into new areas. Look for us to continue to make that balance while trying to stay within that great operating framework we gave you of driving mid to high teens GB growth with higher 30% to 40% EBITDA over the next three years. |
7,194 | UBER | 2 | 2,024 | 2024-08-06 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Mark Mahaney: Thank you Prashanth.
Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: I think with that, we’re going to wrap the call and we’ll turn it back to you, Dara.
Dara Khosrowshahi: Yes, thank you very much everyone for joining the call, and a huge thank you to the team at Uber. Prashanth and I and Deepa get to talk to investors about all the accomplishments and the consistent execution of the team, but it’s actually the teams on the ground, the technical teams who deliver in good markets, bad markets, uncertain markets, and we certainly wouldn’t have the kind of execution that we’ve had without everyone at Team Uber contributing, so big thank you to Team Uber.
Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: And just a reminder, we’re going to be on the west coast, in Chicago, in New York, and in Europe in the coming quarters, so we’re very accessible for folks. Reach out to Deepa if you want to see us.
Dara Khosrowshahi: Awesome. We’ll talk to you next quarter. Thank you again.
Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. We thank you for joining. You may now disconnect. |
7,195 | UBER | 1 | 2,024 | 2024-05-08 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Operator: Thank you for standing by. My name is Sarah, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Uber Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call.
[Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Deepa Subramanian, VP of Investor Relations and Corporate Finance. You may begin.
Deepa Subramanian: Thank you, operator. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today, and welcome to Uber's First Quarter 2024 Earnings Presentation. On the call today, we have Uber's CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi; and CFO, Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah.
During today's call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures, are included in the press release, supplemental slides and our filings with the SEC, each of which is posted to investor.uber.com.
Certain statements in this presentation and on this call are forward-looking statements. You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Actual risks may differ materially from these forward-looking statements, and we do not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements we make today, except as required by law. For more information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements, please refer to the press release we issued today as well as the risks and uncertainties described in our most recent Form 10-K and in other filings made with the SEC.
We published our quarterly earnings press release, prepared remarks and supplemental slides to our Investor Relations website earlier today and we ask you to review those documents, if you haven't already. We will open the call to questions following brief opening remarks from Dara. With that, let me hand it over to Dara. |
7,196 | UBER | 1 | 2,024 | 2024-05-08 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: Thanks, Deepa. Our results this quarter once again demonstrate our ability to deliver consistent, profitable growth at scale. Uber is off to a solid start in 2024 with trips up 21% year-on-year, consistent with our gross bookings growth rate on a constant currency basis. Our audience expanded by 15%, while frequency grew 6%, underpinned by 7.1 million drivers and couriers on our platform. At the same time, record adjusted EBITDA of $1.4 billion grew 82% year-over-year, and we generated $4.2 billion of free cash flow over the last trailing -- over the trailing 12 months.
We're making good progress on many of the initiatives we laid out for 2024 in our last earnings call. Demand for Uber remains strong. And just last week, we hit another best week ever for gross bookings, and we expect to deliver another quarter of over 20% year-on-year growth on a constant currency basis in Q2.
With that, operator, can you open up for questions?
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Your question comes from the line of Justin Post with Bank of America.
Justin Post: I guess, Dara, a lot of press on Tesla and robotaxi efforts lately. How are you thinking about AV impact on Uber and potential for new competition?
And then maybe, Prashanth, it looks like stable bookings growth outlook in the low 20s in the second quarter, excluding FX. Anything to call out on headwinds or tailwinds? And any changes to your outlook, mid- to high teens growth, as you think about bookings in the second quarter?
Dara Khosrowshahi: Prashanth, you want to talk to the second question first... |
7,197 | UBER | 1 | 2,024 | 2024-05-08 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: Prashanth, you want to talk to the second question first...
Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: Yes, why don't I -- let me get that one out of the way, Justin, and thank you for the question. So just a recap for how we'd like folks to think about our gross bookings. Remember, the growth algorithm is audience, which is a measure of how many users of the product; frequency, how often are they using the product; and then, of course, pricing. Dara just mentioned that for the first quarter, we had very strong audience growth, up 15%. Great growth in frequency as well, up 6%. And pricing relatively flattish.
So we see similar trends expected for the second quarter, and that's what's implied in the guide in terms of the composition of that growth algorithm. Demand for the products remains strong. I think we're expecting another quarter of pretty consistent scaled top line growth of over 20%. Actually, if you think of the guide that we gave for Q2, it's almost identical, both at the midpoint and at the range to what you gave -- what we gave for Q1. So very consistent performance, and we're exactly where we want to be with respect to the 3-year CAGR outlook that we gave you in February.
Maybe just a little bit of color on the Q2 guide. We included in the press release some notes on FX headwinds. So we want -- I did want to call that out. We've got about 5 percentage points of headwind to Mobility's year-over-year gross booking growth, primarily coming from the Argentine peso. So said another way, we still expect Mobility to grow in the mid-20s range at a constant currency basis.
I'll also highlight that in the prepared remarks, I made a comment about this, we expect Mobility's adjusted EBITDA margins to be down slightly quarter-over-quarter given that we did hold back some investments in Q1 and we would not do the same here for Q2. So with that, let me pass to Dara, and he can take the AV question. |
7,198 | UBER | 1 | 2,024 | 2024-05-08 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | Dara Khosrowshahi: Justin, in terms of AVs and our strategy, it really remains the same. First thing I would say is that we think that the AV technology at maturity is going to be very good for the industry. It will be great for Uber. It holds a promise of safer rides. It holds a promise of expanding the marketplace by lowering prices and making mobility, delivery available for a wider swath of the population. And usually, when we see kind of lower prices for any service, you see higher adoption for a service, and that really is the promise of AV.
At the same time, we think that the technology is going to take a lot of time to develop. Obviously, there has to be a regulatory framework to put in place. And as the technology develops, we think that actually you're not going to make a jump from one tech -- human drivers fully to AV. There's going to be a relatively long period, a transition period that happens. Where for example, on Uber, you see it now, you have a combination of human drivers during -- human drivers fulfilling certain rides or deliveries or even loads on the trucking side along with AVs as well. And over period of time, you'll see kind of the penetration of AVs increase. I think it's very difficult to predict that period of time.
But really, what we bring is the systems that we put in place, the pricing, matching, routing algorithms, the payments systems that we have on a global basis as well as the demand that we bring that enables us to partner with these AV providers to really drive utilization of their assets, this is very expensive tech that's been developed over a long time. And if you're an AV fleet owner or you are an individual owner of a car, whether that's a Tesla or another kind of car, you're just going to make more money and make a higher kind of return on your investment if you plug in your AVs into the Uber ecosystem and into Uber demand. |
7,199 | UBER | 1 | 2,024 | 2024-05-08 08:00:00 | Uber Technologies, Inc. | 144,524,848 | So we think we bring lots to the table. We're looking to partner with the AV industry. I do think that there's a good amount of excitement over some of the newer technologies and kind of the imitation models that we see in terms of AV. And you see that promise with Tesla's FSD. It looks like a great product. And also, you see that same promise in a lot of smaller players, whether that's a Wayve in the U.K. who got funded for $1 billion, a Waabi that, for example, we have investments in, these imitation learning models have a lot of promise over kind of the more classic heuristic-based development that you saw with AV.
And we think it's going to allow more players into the marketplace. We think it's going to reduce the amount of capital required to develop these systems over a long period of time. And we're looking to partner with big players and small players. And again, as this technology develops, we think we will be a big partner in it, and we think, ultimately, it will benefit AV players and it will benefit ourselves and riders and eaters as well.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Brian Nowak with Morgan Stanley.
Brian Nowak: I have 2. The first one, Prashanth, I want to go back to that -- the comment in the prepared remarks that you just referenced about intentionally holding back some investments with lower ROI. Can you just sort of help us unpack it a little bit? What areas of investments did you hold back on? And sort of how do we think about the driver-versus-rider incentives or investment strategies as you go throughout the course of the year to drive durable growth?
Then the second one, sort of wanted to hone in a little bit on Latin America. There's been some comments from one of your competitors in Latin America about potentially pulling back investment there. One, I'd be curious to hear about your -- what you're seeing in Latin America. And just remind us, what was the base case outlook for Latin America in the Analyst Day guidance that we got in February? |
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