Uber posted high earnings on Wednesday as it touted its long-standing tout to investors that demand for its delivery service would grow even as ride-sharing begins to resume. Pre-pandemic levels appear to be taking shape.
The company’s shares rose 8% in after-hours trading after beating analyst expectations for most indexes in the October-December period.
According to the metric, carpool demand, which was briefly knocked out by the rise of the coronavirus variant Omicron, improved 67% year-on-year based on total bookings, down just 16% from the previous level. pandemic, according to the data.
The company’s delivery business – which includes restaurant meals, groceries and liquor – also remains strong, with total bookings for the unit up 34% year-over-year. year ago, equivalent to 230% of the pre-pandemic quarter. Delivery revenue increased 78% year over year.
The delivery segment turned “profitable” for the first time using Uber’s preference adjustment measure, which eliminated a number of costs including interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.
Shippers had quarterly adjusted ebitda earnings of $25 million, compared with a loss of $145 million in same period last year.
“With the completion of this major milestone, delivery is well positioned to self-capitalize growth in grocery retail and local commerce,” said Dara KhosrowshahiUber’s CEO told investors.
The company’s overall adjusted Ebitda is $86 million, the second consecutive quarter of positive since reached the milestone in the third quarter of last year.
Uber’s share price rally comes despite guidance for the current quarter that was slightly below Wall Street expectations.
It predicts total bookings of $25 billion – $26 billion and adjusted ebitda between $100 million and $130 million, versus expectations of $27 billion and $150 million, respectively.
But investors were encouraged by the news that monthly active users on Uber’s services had reached 118 million, up 27% year-over-year and the highest ever. That’s in contrast to Lyft, the biggest competitor in America, report a small quarter-over-quarter drop in active users in earnings announced on Tuesday.
“Basically Uber has exceeded where it was in 2019 in terms of monthly active consumers, which is a big deal,” said Youssef Squali, an analyst at Truist.
“Some have argued that deliveries will be affected [with reopening]. But at least for now, deliveries continue to perform at a very high level of expectations. ”
Unlike during the first pandemic, when large numbers of motorists decommissioned for Uber, Khosrowshahi said Omicron did not significantly affect its labor supply, with nearly 350,000 drivers joining the platform in the fourth quarter. This has brought the number of active drivers globally to 4.4 million – the highest level since early 2020.
“Our results demonstrate how far we have come since the beginning of the pandemic,” Khosrowshahi said.
“While the Omicron variant started to affect our business in late December, Mobility [the rideshare business] is starting to recover, with total bookings up 25% monthly in the most recent week. ”
The Omicron effect caused the car-sharing division’s revenue to fall slightly from what Wall Street had predicted – $2.28 billion versus $2.43 billion. There were 1.77 billion trips made in the quarter, when analysts were expecting 1.91 billion.
Total revenue of $5.8 billion, up 83 percent year-on-year, topped analyst expectations of $5.35 billion, according to FactSet.
Top number backed by company Cargo carrier announced $1.1 billion in revenue, a first quarter above $1 billion, helped by a recent $2.25 billion acquisition of transportation technology company Transplace.
“It has never been clearer that our supply chain is in dire need of technical innovation,” Khosrowshahi said. “And along with Transplace, Uber Freight, which now has billions of dollars in quarterly run rates, is well positioned to bring digital native change to the massive logistics ecosystem.”
Uber’s massive interest in other companies has again created serious volatility for its profits. Uber’s Q4 net income of $892 million benefits from pre-tax earnings of $1.4 billion from investments in the self-driving car company dawn and Southeast Asia app Grab. In the last quarter, Uber posted $2.4 billion net losslargely due to a revaluation of their stake in China’s Didi Chuxing.
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