Uber announced on Wednesday, Feb. 8, results for the fourth quarter that was above Wall Street forecasts. In early trade, the stock price increased by almost 6%.
Earnings per share of 29 cents beat the 18 cents loss predicted by analysts. Meanwhile, the company earned $8.6 billion in revenue, surpassing the $8.49 billion that experts had expected. Both reports are based on Refinitiv's.
Over the prior year's same period, quarterly revenue increased by 49%. Uber reported a quarterly net income of $595 million, of which $756 million was a net profit attributable to unrealized gains on stock investments.
Service Demand
Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber's CEO, claimed in a prepared statement that the company had its "strongest quarter ever" and "strongest year" in 2022, as reported by CNBC.
Active drivers reached an all-time high during the quarter, and he said the firm had fully recovered from the effect of the pandemic on its mobility division. He also stated that the firm had broken a record by completing two billion journeys in a single quarter, or around one million rides per hour.
Khosrowshahi emphasized that they were able to do this while keeping or growing their competitive edge in all of their primary areas.
Adjusted EBITDA came in at $665m, which was above the $620 million predicted by analysts, as per StreetAccount. This quarter's gross bookings amounted to $30.7 billion, an increase of 19% year over year.
Uber projects a first-quarter 2023 adjusted EBITDA of $660 million to $700 million and a year-over-year increase in gross bookings of 20% to 24% on a constant currency basis.
The quarterly results for Uber's most important business units are as follows: According to StreetAccount, mobility gross bookings came in at $14.9 billion, above analysts' expectations of $14.8 billion. And compared to the $14.3 billion that experts had predicted would be booked in delivery sales, the actual number was $14.3 billion.
Even though Uber's growth was mainly dependent on its Eats delivery service during the Covid outbreak, the company's mobility sector ultimately outpaced Eats sector revenue in the first, second, and third quarters of 2022. This trend continued in the company's fourth-quarter financials, with the mobility sector reporting $4.1 billion in sales and the delivery section reporting $2.9 billion.
Meanwhile, Uber Freight generated $1.5 billion in revenue for the period.
Market Expansion
In the fourth quarter, the number of monthly active platform users grew to 131 million, an increase of 11% year over year. During that time span, the platform had 2.1 billion journeys, an increase of 19% year over year.
In an appearance on CNBC's Squawk Box on Wednesday, Khosrowshahi said that Uber had seen no evidence of a slowdown in customer spending.
He speculated that the firm would gain when consumers shifted their financial priorities from goods to services in the wake of the pandemic.
