Uber Technologies, Inc. (NYSE:UBER) reported fourth-quarter and full-year financial results on Wednesday. The transcript from the company’s earnings call has been provided below.
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Operator
Thank you for standing by. My name is Greg and I will be your conference operator today. At this time I would like to welcome everyone to today’s Uber Q4 and full year 2025 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker’s remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you’d like to ask a question during this time, simply press STAR followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. And if you’d like to withdraw your question, simply press STAR one again. Thank you. I’d now like to turn the call over to Alex Wong, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Alex.
Alex Wong (Senior Director of Investor Relations)
Thank you Greg. Thank you all for joining us today and welcome to Uber’s fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings presentation. On the call today we have Uber’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, CFO Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah, and incoming CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy. 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 or 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 risks and uncertainties described in our most recent Form 10K 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 open the call to questions following brief opening remarks from Dara, Prashant and Balaji. With that, let me hand it over to Dara.
Dara Khosrowshahi
Thanks Alex. Q4 was another great quarter for Uber. Trips on our platform accelerated again to a 15 billion annual run rate and our audience grew to more than 200 million monthly active users. These healthy inputs drove exceptional outputs with gross bookings up 22% year on year. Looking at 2025 in full, we had our fifth consecutive year of annual gross bookings over 20%. We generated 8.7 billion in adjusted EBITDA up 35% and a phenomenal 9.8 billion in free cash flow of 42%. We started 2026 with a ton of momentum, a scaled and profitable platform, and a clear operating framework to generate durable growth. This gives us the confidence to make targeted growth oriented investments aligned with the six strategic areas of focus that we outlined last quarter. Of course, one of these areas is autonomous at this time. Last year we laid out our views on AVS in more depth and we’ve done that again this quarter with the benefit of learning from multiple AV deployments around the world. We’re more convinced than ever that AVS will unlock a multi trillion dollar opportunity for Uber. AVS amplify the fundamental strengths of our platform global scale, deep demand density, sophisticated marketplace technology and decades of on the ground experience matching riders, drivers and vehicles all in real time. We also understand that there are reasonable questions being asked and a debate being had about what autonomy means for Uber, both in the short term and the long term. I’d encourage everyone to read our prepared remarks and and take a look at our supplemental slides where we lay out our latest views and why we believe our approach is proving to be the right one. Finally, I want to take a moment to say thank you to Prashanth, whom we announced this morning will be stepping down as CFO on February 16th. The weather was getting to us to investment great status, spearheading our first share repurchase program or steering us through several acquisitions. Prashanth has been a great partner to me and the management team. I wish him all the best in a very exciting new opportunity that he will share more about very soon. I’m also thrilled that Balaji will be stepping up as CFO. Balaji won’t be a stranger to many of you on the call. I’ve worked closely with him for a long time and I’m confident that he’s the right person for this job. He knows our business inside and out. He’s a bold thinker and brilliant strategist and I’m super excited to have him join the management team at this important time for Uber. Now I’ll hand it over to Prashanth and Balaji to say a few words and then we’ll take your questions.
Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah (Outgoing Chief Financial Officer)
Thank you boss. First, I want to say thank you to Dara and the entire Uber management team. And of course my heartfelt congratulations to Balaji, who I know will do a terrific job. Uber is a once in a generation company. It’s a dynamic, fast moving and innovative place and I have loved every moment of my time here and I am extremely bullish about its future. Over the holidays, I had a chance to take stock of where we were and all that we had achieved from delivering phenomenal growth at scale, achieving investment grade status and returning significant cash to shareholders. At the same time, a new opportunity presented itself where I could serve America and give back to the country that has given me and my family so much. I look forward to sharing more on that soon. And in the meantime, I’ll be working with Dara and Balaji to ensure both a successful and seamless transition. Now let me hand it over to Balaji.
Balaji Krishnamurthy (Incoming Chief Financial Officer)
Thank you Prashant, for everything you’ve done for Uber and thank you Dara, for the trust you’re putting in me. It’s an honor to step into this role at this moment. I’m lucky to be building from such a strong base, an accelerating core business supported by huge and increasingly active consumer earner and merchandise, large and growing cash flows which we can use strategically to invest into our future and world class talent that is innovating and executing at scale with a go get it culture that is always pushing ahead. I look forward to working with Dara, the management team, our board, and that all of you to solidify Uber’s position as a once in a generation company that stands the test of time. With that, we’ll take your questions.
Operator
All right, operator. All right, thank you very much. At this time again, I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, press star number one on your telephone keypad. Once again, star one. And we’ll pause just a moment to compile the Q and A roster. All right, looks like our first question today comes from the line of Justin Post with Bank of America. Justin.
Bank of America Analyst
Great. I guess I’ll ask about the competitive environment on AVs and really appreciate all the slides and prepared remarks. Just wanted to think in the context of 30% of your bookings coming from major cities which you outlined, how do you think about the impact of AV ramps from say Tesla or Waymo in those cities on market share and your profitability? Just high level on those things. Thanks.
Dara Khosrowshahi (Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, definitely. Justin. So I think the good news on AV for us is that we view the introduction of AVs as actually an overall growth driver for the markets in which we operate. Right. So San Francisco gross bookings for us have accelerated. Where we are in Austin and Atlanta as well, our bookings have accelerated. New riders to the platform is growing faster than the rest of the country. Frequency is super strong as well. So AVS in The marketplace, whether they’re competitive not self-sufficient or whether they’re on our platforms like Austin and Atlanta are turning out to be net positives in growing the overall economic pie or the economic pie available to movement, so to speak. So from that standpoint, when we look at AVs, it’s fundamentally a positive opportunity as reflected in Waymo’s latest valuation, 110 billion, which is pretty incredible on a pre money basis. But this is not kind of a technology that is going to replace, it’s going to augment. And then when we see our own performance as it relates to AVs, we’re seeing AVs on our platform at significantly higher utilizations than kind of one piece standalone platforms based on the publicly available data. In that trips per vehicle per day or 30% higher ETAs are better as well. So we know that the best product today out there in the market is an AV on the Uber platform as well. And then if you look at the partnerships that we are setting up, whether it’s a partnership with Waymo or Nvidia or newest partner Wabi or avride or Neuro and Lucid, which kind of have a production ready car out there, we expect to be in 15 cities by the end of this year and then expanding beyond that as well, which should actually increase kind of the wave of kind of the AV business that we’re seeing behind us. So from a top line basis, we see AV as a net positive for the ecosystem. In terms of margins, I think AVs are going to be very similar to other products out there, which is anytime we introduce a newer product, we introduce it at a lower margin than let’s say uberx or Uber Black or Uber Reserve. As we’re building out liquidity and then over a period of time, margins improve. And for example, in the deals that we’re striking today with various partners, with AV partners at scale, we are going to have healthy economics based on current consumer fares and healthy economics mean positive economics. And these are deals that we’re striking right now. So from a margin standpoint, structurally we think the AV kind of ecosystem, it’ll add top, it’ll be a net positive to mobility generally. The margins that we are getting, we’re getting now are good positive margins. And they’re fair for our partners and they’re fair for us as well. And from a competitive standpoint, at this point, AVS really haven’t scaled right. We added 50 times the trips on the Uber platform this last year than kind of the entire AV industry added. As it scales up, you know we expect it to be competitive. We think a lot of these players will be on our platform as they realize that utilization is structurally higher in a 3P platform. And listen, competition is nothing new for us. We’re the multi product player. We are everywhere, we are global as well. And then with a membership program that really gets people highly, highly engaged with our platform, we’re very confident in terms of what we will do in competitive market and we’re very confident that we’re going to be the first choice for kind of AV manufacturers and technology companies to put their assets on our platform.
Balaji Krishnamurthy (Incoming Chief Financial Officer)
And Justin, this is Balaji, don’t. One additional thing I’d add there is while you asked about the top markets, it’s important to remember that 70% of the US is outside of the stock markets and nearly 75% of our US profits come from those markets. And those numbers have been growing because those markets are growing faster than the top 20 cities. I think this is a very, very common misconception. We’ve heard many times that Uber’s profit pools are concentrated in the top cities and it could not be further from the truth. And as you think about where these go in the near term, Those non top 20 markets are going to be unlikely to be addressed by avs for a long time to come as well. So from our perspective, not only are we going to be well positioned in those markets to be the platform of choice for our EV partners, but for the remainder of the US it is going to be played by traditional ride sharing operators such as Uber.
Dara Khosrowshahi
And also just remind investors that 60% of our mobility gross bookings are international outside of the US as well. So we have a big business in the US outside of the big cities and we have an even bigger business outside of the US …