Uber beats estimates and the stock is up
Uber reported fourth-quarter earnings Wednesday that beat analysts’ estimates. Shares were up about 2.5%.
Here’s how the company did:
- Earnings per share: 29 cents vs. 18 cent loss expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.
- Revenue: $8.6 billion vs. $8.49 billion expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv.
Revenue for the quarter was up 49% year over year. Uber noted that net income for the quarter was $595 million, of which $756 million was a net benefit due to unrealized gains on equity investments.
In a prepared statement, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said Uber ended 2022 with its “strongest quarter ever,” capping off its “strongest year.” He said the pandemic’s impact on the company’s mobility business is “now well and truly behind us,” and that active drivers hit an all-time high during the quarter. He noted that the company also achieved a new milestone and hit 2 billion trips in a single quarter for the first time, averaging around 1 million trips per hour.
“Importantly, we achieved these results while also maintaining or improving our competitive position across our key markets,” he said in the statement.
The company reported adjusted EBITDA of $665 million, more than the $620 million expected by analysts, according to StreetAccount. Gross bookings for the quarter came in at $30.7 billion, up 19% year over year.
For the first quarter of 2023, Uber said it expects gross bookings to grow between 20% and 24% year over year on a constant currency basis, and an adjusted EBITDA of $660 million to $700 million.
Here’s how Uber’s largest business segments performed in the quarter:
Mobility (gross bookings): $14.9 billion vs. 14.8 billion expected by analysts, according to StreetAccount
Delivery (gross bookings): $14.3 billion vs. $14.3 billion expected by analysts, according to StreetAccount.
Uber relied heavily on growth in its Eats delivery business during the Covid pandemic, but its mobility segment surpassed Eats revenue in its first, second, and third quarters of 2022 as riders began to take more trips. That trend continued during the fourth quarter, as the company’s mobility segment reported $4.1 billion in revenue while delivery reported $2.9 billion.
Uber’s freight business booked $1.5 billion in sales for the quarter.
The number of monthly active platform consumers climbed to 131 million in the fourth quarter, up 11% year over year. There were 2.1 billion trips completed on the platform during the period, up 19% year over year.
Khosrowshahi told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Wednesday that Uber is not seeing any signs of consumer spend weakness. He said the company may be benefitting from a shift from retail to services spending following the pandemic.
“We have looked and looked,” he said. “We’re not seeing any signs of consumer weakness at this point.”
However, Khosrowshahi said about 70% of drivers are saying that inflation is a factor in their decision to come onto Uber’s platform.
“We may be benefiting from that trend, we’ll see where it takes us,” he said.
Uber will hold its quarterly call with investors at 8:00 a.m. ET Wednesday.
The Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, June 9, 2023.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Silicon Valley executives and financiers publicly opened their wallets in support of President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run. The early returns in 2025 aren’t great, to say the least.
Following Trump’s sweeping tariff plan announced Wednesday, the Nasdaq suffered steep consecutive daily drops to finish 10% lower for the week, the index’s worst performance since the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020.
The tech industry’s leading CEO’s rushed to contribute to Trump’s inauguration in January and paraded to Washington, D.C., for the event. Since then, it’s been a slog.
The market can always turn around, but economists and investors aren’t optimistic, and concerns are building of a potential recession. The seven most valuable U.S. tech companies lost a combined $1.8 trillion in market cap in two days.
Apple slid 14% for the week, its biggest drop in more than five years. Tesla, led by top Trump adviser Elon Musk, plunged 9.2% and is now down more than 40% for the year. Musk contributed close to $300 million to help propel Trump back to the White House.
Nvidia, Meta and Amazon all suffered double-digit drops for the week. For Amazon, a ninth straight weekly decline marks its longest such losing streak since 2008.
With Wall Street selling out of risky assets on concern that widespread tariff hikes will punish the U.S. and global economy, the fallout has drifted down to the IPO market. Online lender Klarna and ticketing marketplace StubHub delayed their IPOs due to market turbulence, just weeks after filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and fintech company Chime is also reportedly delaying its listing.
CoreWeave, a provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, last week became the first venture-backed company to raise more than $1 billion in a U.S. IPO since 2021. But the company slashed its offering, and trading has been very volatile in its opening days on the market. The stock plunged 12% on Friday, leaving it 17% above its offer price but below the bottom of its initial range.
“You couldn’t create a worse market and macro environment to go public,” said Phil Haslett, co-founder of EquityZen, a platform for investing in private companies. “Way too much turbulence. All flights are grounded until further notice.”
CoreWeave investor Mark Klein of SuRo Capital previously told CNBC that the company could be the first in an “IPO parade.” Now he’s backtracking.
“It appears that the IPO parade has been temporarily halted,” Klein told CNBC by email on Friday. “The current tariff situation has prompted these companies to pause and assess its impact.”
‘Cave rapidly’
During last year’s presidential campaign, prominent venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen backed Trump, expecting that his administration would usher in a boom and eliminate some of the hurdles to startup growth set up by the Biden administration. Andreessen and his partner, Ben Horowitz, said in July that their financial support of the Trump campaign was due to what they called a better “little tech agenda.”
A spokesperson for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment.
Some techies who supported Trump in the campaign have taken to social media to defend their positions.
Venture capitalist Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, posted on X on Thursday that “Trump Derangement Syndrome has morphed into Tariff Derangement Syndrome.” He said tariffs aren’t inflationary, are effective at reducing fentanyl imports, and he expects that “most other countries will cave and cave rapidly.”
That was before China’s Finance Ministry said on Friday that it will impose a 34% tariff on all goods imported from the U.S. starting on April 10.
At Sequoia Capital, which is the biggest investor in Klarna, outspoken Trump supporter Shaun Maguire, wrote on X, “The first long-term thinking President of my lifetime,” and said in a separate post that, “The price of stocks says almost nothing about the long term health of an economy.”
However, Allianz Chief Economic Advisor Mohamed El-Erian warned on Friday that Trump’s extensive raft of import tariffs are putting the U.S. economy at risk of recession.
“You’ve had a major repricing of growth prospects, with a recession in the U.S. going up to 50% probability, you’ve seen an increase in inflation expectations, up to 3.5%,” he told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy.
Former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates, left, and Steve Ballmer, center, pose for photos with CEO Satya Nadella during an event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Microsoft on April 4, 2025 in Redmond, Washington.
Stephen Brashear | Getty Images
Meanwhile, executives at tech’s megacap companies were largely silent this week, and their public relations representatives declined to provide comments about their thinking.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was in the awkward position on Friday of celebrating his company’s 50th anniversary at corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Alongside Microsoft’s prior two CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Nadella sat down with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin for a televised interview that was planned well before Trump’s tariff announcement.
When asked about the tariffs at the top of the interview, Nadella effectively dodged the question and avoided expressing his views about whether the new policies will hamper Microsoft’s business.
Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014, acknowledged to Sorkin that “disruption is very hard on people” and that, “as a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good.” Ballmer and Gates are two of the 12 wealthiest people in the world thanks to their Microsoft fortunes.
C-suites may not be able to stay quiet for long, especially if the recent turmoil spills into next week.
Lise Buyer, who previously helped guide Google through its IPO and now works as an adviser to companies going public, said there’s no appetite for risk in the market under these conditions. But there is risk that staffers get jittery, and they’ll surely look to their leaders for some reassurance.
“Until markets settle out and we have the opportunity to access valuation levels, public company CEOs should work to calm potentially distressed employees,” Buyer said in an email. “And private company managements should refine plans to get by on dollars already in the treasury.”
— CNBC’s Hayden Field, Jordan Novet, Leslie Picker, Annie Palmer and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.
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