Q4 2024 Uber Technologies Inc Earnings Call
Hello and welcome to the Uber fourth quarter 2024 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise.
Speaker Change: After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session and if you would like to ask a question during this time, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. I would now like to turn the conference over to Deepa Subramanian, Vice President, Investor Relations. You may begin.
Thank you, operator.
Speaker Change: Thank you for joining us today and welcome to Uber's fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings presentation. On the call today, we have Uber CEO Dara Khoshrowshahi and CFO Prashanth Mahendra Raja.
Speaker Change: During today's call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures.
Speaker Change: 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.
Speaker Change: 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.
Speaker Change: Actual results made defermentarily from this forward-looking statement, and we do not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements we make today, except as required by law.
Speaker Change: 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.
Speaker Change: We publish 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.
Speaker Change: 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. Thanks, Deepa.
Dara Khoshrowshahi: 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.
Dara Khoshrowshahi: This performance was powered by strong product innovation across our platform, driving multi-product use to an all-time high of 37% of Uber consumers.
Dara Khoshrowshahi: It was also a stellar few months for UberOne membership program, where we added 5 million members in the quarter, bringing our total member base to 30 million, up nearly 60% year-on-year.
Dara Khoshrowshahi: We're now one year into the three-year outlook we presented to investors last February, and I'm pleased to say that in 2024, we cleanly exceeded our commitments on all three components of that framework.
Dara Khoshrowshahi: Gross bookings grew 21% versus their commitment to mid to high teens constant currency CAGR
Dara Khoshrowshahi: adjusted EBITDA grew 60% year-on-year versus the high 30s to 40% CAGR an annual free cash flow conversion as a percentage of EBITDA was a hundred and six percent versus our indication of 90 plus percent
Dara Khoshrowshahi: We're thrilled with this performance and have started 2025 with a lot of momentum.
Dara Khoshrowshahi: Despite FX headwinds, we expect continued strong growth in Q1, with 17-21% cost-to-currency gross bookings growth and continued profit expansion.
Dara Khoshrowshahi: Lastly, a word on autonomous. I'd encourage everyone to read our prepared remarks and supplemental slides where we spend some more time this quarter sharing our perspective on the state of AVs.
Dara Khoshrowshahi: The key takeaway is that while AV technology is advancing, commercialization will take significantly longer, and we have conviction that Uber will be the indispensable go-to-market partner for AV players.
Dara Khoshrowshahi: 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.
Dara Khoshrowshahi: Just today, we announced that Austin residents can sign up for our interest list right in their Uber app to increase their chances of matching with Waymo AV when we launch next month.
With that, Operator, let's take your questions.
Speaker Change: 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,
Brian Nowak: How 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?
Brian Nowak: And then on the core business, can you just 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.
Dara Khoshrowshahi: 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. And I think the way that you can think about it is that, you know, every new product that we build,
We first build by going out and investing in supply.
Dara Khoshrowshahi: 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 minutes consistent ETAs.
Dara Khoshrowshahi: in order for the network effects that you see on a local basis for us 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.
We did it for UberX in the past.
Dara Khoshrowshahi: It's just an investment in building out the supply base to match.
Dara Khoshrowshahi: Variable Demand, and then magic happens in a particular city. You'll see that magic in work in Austin coming up in a month.
Dara Khoshrowshahi: Manage Autonomous, we are looking at acquiring Tana depots with the electrification required for
Dara Khoshrowshahi: charging the fleets, etc. And obviously, we are going out to with various autonomous players and building out technical partnerships and then talking with OEMs.
Speaker Change: about securing supply as their manufacturing platforms are preparing to get to scale for the next generation of autonomous.
So it's a broad investment.
Speaker Change: It's across a very, very low number of units, so you're not really going to notice it in the P&L.
Speaker Change: 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,
Speaker Change: You're unlikely to, you know, impact the three-year outlook that we've given you. We think we can, this is kind of the power of and, which is we can deliver and some on the three-year outlook, and at the same time we can be investing aggressively in AV supply in every way.
Speaker Change: Brian, Prashanth, I'm going to take the second part of that question and I think your question was really around the mobility profitability trends and outlooks so
Speaker Change: 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.
Speaker Change: 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.
Speaker Change: We see continued benefits from supply incentives, leverage on the operating costs, 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
on a constant currency basis, 24% in Q4.
Speaker Change: 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 5 million sequentially, and I think it's up 60% year over year.
Speaker Change: Teens is another great area. I think we've more than doubled the number of countries.
Speaker Change: 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 add 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 30s to 40% profitability.
Speaker Change: 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. Great, thank you both.
Speaker Change: The next question comes from Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.
Okay.
Speaker Change: 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.
Speaker Change: to a shopper inside Uber Eats today is very different than it was 12, 18 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.
Speaker Change: 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,
Speaker Change: 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.
Speaker Change: In the last couple of quarters, we've made some comments on how we're focusing on less dense or some of the sparser geographies, which I think is where your question is coming from. So as a reminder, the growth framework through 2026 is...
Speaker Change: 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.
Speaker Change: The initiative that we're focusing on in those less dense or sparser 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,
Speaker Change: Growth has started to come down a bit because those areas obviously are more penetrated.
Speaker Change: Now, we can offset this by pushing out into less areas. This started initially as a U.S. delivery initiative, and it's really expanded now into a global one. I would say that as we focused on the U.S. 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 U.S. and non-U.S.
Speaker Change: as well as in non-U.S. delivery, where we're now creating some more programs in this space.
Speaker Change: 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.
Speaker Change: 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 want to continue to grow out in Europe. We've got our efforts to add taxis.
Speaker Change: 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.
Speaker Change: to spur demand and sort of get that flywheel going that is the magic of the Uber marketplace.
Speaker Change: If you want to pay with price, you can use something like our reserve product, which will give you a very high accuracy of you'll know when your ride is going to be there. And it allows us to use our marketplace tech to make sure that we find someone who's able to
Speaker Change: 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 times, which allow us, again, to use the Marketplace algos.
Speaker Change: 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.
Speaker Change: And then I think on the on 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.
Speaker Change: In terms of selection, we've got over a million active merchants.
But if you look at our total kind of
penetration here in our top 10 markets.
Speaker Change: We have about a third of the merchants out in those markets, so we think there's a huge amount of runway as it relates to selection.
Speaker Change: 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
Speaker Change: The number of merchant-funded offers, so to speak, to lowering price is at all-time highs. This is a really important initiative in terms of merchants being able to...
Speaker Change: 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's able membership essentially effectively is delivering discounts
Speaker Change: 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 defect rate continues.
Speaker Change: to go down in terms of making sure that every delivery is a perfect delivery.
Speaker Change: 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.
Speaker Change: to cost efficiency and quality as well. So when you bring all that together, selection, price, quality, increased marketing campaigns, hopefully you'll see our Super Bowl campaign out there.
You get a good combination of growth and merchants.
Speaker Change: Growth in audience, growth in frequency, and it's all powered by our push into less dense areas and membership as well. So we're very, very happy with the trends there. You saw delivery gross bookings accelerate.
Speaker Change: quarter-on-quarter, and we think that's just more evidence that we've got a long, long runway here.
Justin Post: All right, next question. The next question comes from Justin Post with Bank of America. Your line is open.
Justin Post: Great, thanks, appreciate it. A couple of questions on the prepared remarks.
Speaker Change: Dara, you mentioned nine different AV companies and also OEMs in your prepared remarks.
Speaker Change: 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 the market could evolve from here and why it might not be just just two companies and what you're seeing globally?
Speaker Change: 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, you know, what would be 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.
Speaker Change: Enormous, we estimate that the U.S. market alone is a trillion dollar opportunity as you commercialize ADS scale and bring the unit economics down.
Speaker Change: And while 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 get to prime time, so to speak.
Speaker Change: We think that the commercialization of the technology is going to take way, way longer. And by the time that the technology commercializes all over the world and in the U.S., you're going to see many, many more players get over the finish line as it relates to technology.
Speaker Change: And just stepping back for a second, this applies for the U.S. and applies all over the world. There are five factors that you need.
Speaker Change: All of which need to come together for scale commercialization of this business. And scale commercialization is like 10, 20, 30% of our volumes on a U.S. basis, let's say, a global basis.
Speaker Change: First, you have to get regulations, you've got to enable regulations. There are national regulations, state regulations, city regulations. It's pretty complicated. Obviously, regulators have to be, get comfortable with this new technology on the streets affecting our everyday.
Speaker Change: Second, you know, in order to get regulators comfortable, we think you need to consistently
Speaker Change: Super human safety record. Like, we don't think it's good enough for...
Speaker Change: And I'll tell them, Stryber, to be better than a human. I think we have the chance to be multiple times better than the human.
Speaker Change: 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.
Speaker Change: Third, you need a cost-effective hardware platform like the hardware platforms now they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars You've got to get to the tens of thousands of dollars There's a lot of work to be done to get there and many many years to build out these scale hardware platforms
Speaker Change: 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 and you know finding lost items The millions of lost items we do every year
And then fifth, you need a high utilization network.
Speaker Change: 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.
Speaker Change: And we think the only way that all five could come together is Uber partnered up.
Speaker Change: with the AV 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
Speaker Change: Now, I think that you're going to see lots of experimentation and AD players, you know, going direct, working with us, etc.
Speaker Change: But especially what we're looking forward to are launches in Austin, Atlanta.
where I think we're going to demonstrate.
Speaker Change: You know, pretty clearly that a combination of a great AV provider like Waymo and Uber is the best combination out there. And I think this is going to apply in the U.S.
It's going to 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.
Speaker Change: But by the time all five of these entities come together,
Speaker Change: Regulatory, etc. which is going to be years from now. I think you're going to have a number of players getting to prime time both in the US and internationally.
Speaker Change: 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 U.S. and you're going to see it all over the world.
Speaker Change: Justin, I'll take the second part of that question, which I think was on putting our Q1 guide in perspective.
Speaker Change: So let's maybe start with a recap of Q4. 21% GB growth at constant currency year over year. And now we have delivered at 21% for four out of the last five quarters and that that growth
Speaker Change: 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.
Speaker Change: When you look at our Q1 guide, we outlined that it's going to 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 about 33% at the midpoint for EBITDA.
Speaker Change: So I'll break down some elements of that GB growth to help put it in context.
Speaker Change: Those adjustments there, you can easily get to another one to two points of GB growth if you were to normalize for that.
Speaker Change: Second, we've got the growth in Q1 again going to be led by audience similar to what we saw in Q4.
Moon.
Speaker Change: 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. So we're expecting FX to be a larger top-line headwind in Q1, I think five and a half percentage points of headwind, and that compares to closer to three.
the US.
ISI, Unknown Executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, Evercore ISI, GAAP, Prashanth Mahendra
Speaker Change: So now, focusing specifically on Latin America, we had a number of countries that saw significant currency depreciation against the U.S. dollar, notably Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil, and these are top 20 countries for us, so we certainly feel the impact of them on the top line.
Speaker Change: 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
Speaker Change: They tend to be driven by those U.S. dollar denominated expenses, which will be some of our tech organization, our GNA, and other U.S. built cost structure.
Speaker Change: So the way we sort of operate the company is that
Speaker Change: 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.
A couple of years.
Speaker Change: And Justin, just one comment from me. Listen, I think a lot of investors ask how long can Uber keep growing at this scale as fast as it does?
Speaker Change: 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.
Great, thanks for answering the questions and answers.
Speaker Change: Great. Next question. 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 and Phoenix and just how you're helping drive utilization and demand there in particular. And then Prashanth, just given the
Speaker Change: the healthier pricing backdrop in rides that we're seeing through 25. Can you just talk about how you're thinking about sustainability of insurance costs and those slower insurance price increases through the year? Thank you.
Dara Khoshrowshahi: Absolutely. So Doug, in terms of AB, the first thing that I would...
Caution is that
Dara Khoshrowshahi: The scale of these AV deployments, both for us in Phoenix, with Waymo, and 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...
These smaller numbers.
Our very, very early experience in Phoenix suggests that...
Dara Khoshrowshahi: and some of the other deployments that we've got suggest that the Uber network is able to drive
Dara Khoshrowshahi: significantly higher utilization versus any kind of first party network could just because of the scale and
Dara Khoshrowshahi: And, you know, the other pattern that we see is customers love the product. So the opt-in rate for customers.
Dara Khoshrowshahi: The second time that they're offered an AV is significantly higher than the opt-in rate the first time.
Dara Khoshrowshahi: So it's a great product and you see that in terms of pricing, you can actually price the product at a premium too.
Dara Khoshrowshahi: which is terrific. So those are very, you know, it's a great product. Doesn't really have an effect on our 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.
Dara Khoshrowshahi: 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 going to be quite strong.
Speaker Change: Great, that second question, doggone insurance, let me, maybe I'll start with a reminder that
Speaker Change: with 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 50 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.
Speaker Change: So, at a macro level, we're pleased to see that the insurance pressure is easing.
Speaker Change: 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 20s.
Speaker Change: So with the external headwinds peaking and we are also starting to see the benefits of all the internal initiatives
Speaker Change: that we've been driving, such as the tech innovation and policy work.
Speaker Change: 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 U.S. 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.
Speaker Change: 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 U.S. markets.
a driver insights dashboard, and this allows drivers
Speaker Change: 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 accelerations, et cetera. 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 they were not aware of before, is improving their behavior.
Speaker Change: 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 encouraging, giving them visibility to the score and then sort of encouraging the behavior we want through economics is going to continue to play out through the use of our tech.
Speaker Change: 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.
Speaker Change: 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.
Speaker Change: 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.
Speaker Change: 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 AV.
Doug Anmuth: Thank you, Doug. We'll go to the next question. Thank you.
Speaker Change: The next question is from Michael Morton with Moffitt Nathanson. Your line is open.
Michael Morton: Hey, thank you for the question and appreciate the new remarks on AVs. If I could follow up on a question, on a comment Dara made earlier and just general business models with AVs. When you talk about securing supply from OEMs,
Michael Morton: Are you speaking about Uber buying cars directly? And then when you're thinking over the long term about...
potential business models with AVs, could you talk about
Michael Morton: an agency model versus a merchant model of ranking AVs for the day.
Michael Morton: 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 costs? Thank you so much.
Michael Morton: Yeah, absolutely, Michael. So in terms of the business model, I think there's going to be a ton of experimentation around the business models.
Michael Morton: I think eventually it's going to turn into the fleet partners that we have, essentially buying cars and getting financing from third parties.
Michael Morton: In the early days, you're not going to have a financing construct in place.
Michael Morton: We have a lot of 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...
Michael Morton: will be a combination of fleet partners. You might see some financial players, you know, kind of infrastructure players, just like they
Michael Morton: There are entities REITs 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
Michael Morton: these cars and these fleets and taking care of the car sort of small business fleets
that again, we see.
around the world for ourselves.
Michael Morton: operating a SMB fleet model as well. So it's going to 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 going to be financialized.
You know, in terms of AV...
Michael Morton: I think a couple of things in terms of the addressable market. First of all, I think early on, right now the cost of AVs don't even come close to the cost of drivers. So I think the first markets that are going to be penetrated are going to depend on regulation first of all. And again, the regulatory environment is pretty complicated.
Michael Morton: And second is kind of the revenue per mile in the markets.
Michael Morton: and will tend to be in the center of cities, you know, the operational domain for many of these AV deployments.
is very, very limited.
Michael Morton: and over a period of time is going to expand. So I think in the next five years...
Michael Morton: The addressable market is going to be probably in the order of 10-15% of the overall marketplace and then gradually is going to expand over a period of time over the next 15 years or so.
Michael Morton: Thank you, Michael. Sarah, we have time for one more question.
Speaker Change: 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.
Speaker Change: First, how much of this EBITDA guide is impacted by FX?
Speaker Change: And then bigger picture, I guess the skeptical take would be that pricing was a tailwind for the business for several years.
Speaker Change: We're now hitting that ceiling and as you push more on affordability, it's going to be a headwind to margins going forward.
Speaker Change: 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.
Speaker Change: Yeah, Nikhil, why don't I just take the first part of it and let Dara take the longer part of it there. I mentioned, I went through a little bit on the FX side.
Speaker Change: and our philosophy on FX. Clearly, the impact of foreign exchange and the profits that we collect.
Speaker Change: in those foreign jurisdictions when they come back to the U.S. are worth less and with more than half of our business outside the U.S.
Speaker Change: sort of that's been the philosophy of the company. We talked about that in the prepared remarks. So it's, it is not a zero impact, it certainly weighs on the business. But for your for your modeling purposes,
Speaker Change: 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.
Speaker Change: 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 U.S.
Speaker Change: And the vast majority of that price increase has been passed along cost of insurance.
Speaker Change: So, it shows up in gross bookings, it shows up in costs.
Speaker Change: and that part of the price increase is ultimately economically neutral.
Speaker Change: We've always believed in kind of a model where we build out premium products, so this is our
Speaker Change: U4B product, which is a highly premium reserve products as well for U4B, we introduced Business Black as well, and using the higher margin of the premium products.
Speaker Change: to fund the lower-cost products like UberX Share and Shuttle, et cetera, taxi, two-wheelers, three-wheelers.
Speaker Change: And 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.
Speaker Change: 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 30s to 40% growth.
Speaker Change: 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.
Speaker Change: Thanks, thanks Nikhil. So before we wrap up here, I wanted to share some news.
Speaker Change: After nearly six action-packed years, Deepa has decided to leave Uber. Today is going to be her last day with us. So on behalf of Dara, the leadership team, and the Global Finance Org, I do want to thank Deepa for her many contributions to Uber and wish her all the best in her next challenge.
Speaker Change: Balaji Krishnamoorthi, who many of you know well, is going to step in to lead IR in addition to his existing role managing the strategic finance team. So Balaji will be joining you for the Q4 callbacks this morning along with Alex and the IR team.
Speaker Change: 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.
Speaker Change: And then just to close, I want to thank the Uber team for all their great work in 2024, and thank you for joining us this morning.
Speaker Change: This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect.