Results: Uber 1q26
Continued rapid growth and strategic progress.
Original review: Uber in 20 years.
Tag for finding my other articles on this stock: UBER
Key takeaways
Clear evidence of price elasticity - gross bookings is rising as insurance costs come down. This is critical for the long term thesis that Uber’s TAM will explode as AVs bring down costs.
Thesis and valuation update
Thesis intact. Rapid growth, operating leverage, AV fragmentation, and positive commentary around their relationship with AI personal assistants which I see as the big competitive threat.
23x 2026 normalised EPS (per TIKR) and 16x trailing FCF. Lower if you adjust for equity stakes.
Notes
Gross bookings +21% (audience 17%, mobility 20%, delivery 23%). Revenue +10% (18% without move of driver payments from COGS to contra-revenue in the UK). Non-GAAP EBIT +42% on segment operating leverage offset by corporate investment in tech headcount. Non-GAAP NI +39% and non-GAAP EPS +44%.
TTM FCF $9.8bn.
$3bn buyback in the q (40m shares).
$8bn of equity stakes on the balance sheet, mostly public.
Key operating stats/features
Insurance coming down, mostly passed through, strong elasticity helping bookings growth.
50m Uber One members, up 50%; better retention, 3x spending, 50% of gross bookings are now members.
Cross-platform users growing 1.5x faster than overall users.
In mobility, barbell strategy: low cost products like Wait and Save drive 75% more frequency than core products while premium features drive 3.5x the profit. All drives higher lifetime value.
Adding selection in sparse/suburban markets is growing gross bookings in these markets at 2x overall rate and at higher margins. See higher % of reserve and Wait and Save in these markets too - improves reliability.
Uber for Business now does $5bn of high margin gross bookings and is growing 45%.Target $10bn by 2028.
Can now order eats to pick up on the way in a taxi, and delivery to room in hotels.
Can book hotels in-app via Expedia partnership. Long wondered whether they could evolve from on-demand to planned services. Uber Reserve answered this - hence hotels. Giving most of the economics of this deal to Uber One members.
Launched in Finland and straight to #1 in the App Store - there is a global halo/network effect, not just local.
Delivery in 35 countries now and targeting more. Within Delivery, Grocery and retail growing fast with added selection and growing awareness. AI shoppers help.
Freight gross bookings +6%. Nearly as many new enterprise customers added in 1q26 as in all of 2025. “Significant opportunity to more tightly integrate Freight with the broader Uber platform to create a cohesive end-to-end logistics ecosystem”.
Earners +21%. Various new features to boost driver experience - AI assistant, Hourly, Women Preferences.
AI:
Bumping up FY AI budget already.
“It’s creating…employees with superpowers,” an accelerator for every company.
Will hire fewer people than planned this year due to AI.
Can now predict where you are going 3/4 of the time.
Turn a recipe, image, or prompt into a curated cart.
Can now personalise user interfaces. Different users interact in different ways. To date they have had to build for the majority. Now they can build for everyone. Key for adding new services, driving cross-platform usage, personalised upsell, etc.
AV “is another $1tn TAM”.
Live in 8 cities, 15 by yearend, rides up 10x y/y.
No negative impact when Waymo launches in a city. In markets where Waymo has been operating for a while (SF, LA) Uber’s category share is higher than 6 months ago.
Bottleneck is cars on the road.
30 autonomous partners. Success in signing partners is because they have demand. Also Uber Autonomous Solutions lets partners focus on building the driver while Uber does everything else.
Santander deal paves way to AV fleet financing. Difficulty is lack of established residual value, but their ability to offer predictable demand (and higher than 1P networks) underpins attractive financing.
Working with Marsh and Apollo on insurance.
Working with Hertz on fleet management and securing depots in regulation-ready markets. Builds on work they have done for some time as drivers have switched to EV.
Data offering for training models “has scaled quickly” - some of the earner fleet has robotax-grade sensors creating a differentiated dataset in combination with Uber’s proprietary data.
AV investments need to drive audience acquisition, frequency, or margin. Investing capital for now, but vehicle investments are transferrable to finance partners in time.
Personal assistants vs interacting with apps
“Talking to many of these third-party agents. We have a great market position… [we] often dictate the terms of trade in those discussions”.
“I think we’ll continue to see that the majority of our transactions come direct.”
Building an indispensable service in mobility and delivery over 70 countries.
Engaged users / Uber One bring people to the app.
Assistants will interact with Uber’s agents.
Fears of metasearch in travel were unfounded. Most of the value stayed with Expedia, Booking, Airbnb.
Google Maps had comparison shopping between Uber and Lyft, and it wasn’t the same experience as coming direct to the app.
Thanks for reading - if you enjoyed reading this please like and restack, and do get in touch if you have questions.
Pete
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