Uber Technologies, Inc. (NYSE:UBER) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

So we’ve seen some good progress, positive legislation in Florida, in Virginia and Georgia, working on some other states as well. And we’re also active in a number of states, including California. You might have seen that — you might have seen some activity on this in the last couple of weeks where we see an opportunity to really educate the new legislatures given there’s a fairly high level of turnover, that’s expected at the state level, 40 or so seats that are going to open up. And we’ve indicated that we’re willing to put as much as $30 million into our Uber innovation pack, which is really focused on helping to identify business-friendly legislatures for the California State. Wrapping up at the kind of — at the overall 2024 level, I would say that the insurance cost per trip for the US, that’s certainly going to be a headwind.

We’ve got these multiple cost mitigation efforts that we’re going to continue to factor. And really, Justin, to your question, all of that is priced into the guide. So you should expect all that to be reflected in the outlook we’re giving.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Mark Mahaney from Evercore ISI. Please go ahead.

Mark Mahaney: Yeah, thanks. Let me ask two questions, please. On the advertising revenue growth that’s been better than maybe we all thought a year or two ago, what do you think have been the biggest kind of growth surprises. What parts of the — all advertising platforms that you have done the best for you. And then in terms of Uber One, you got 19 million users. It’s a really good number. I know it’s a product that kind of like Prime over time can have more — not more — not just bells and whistles, but more really great features and functionality added to it. Can you just give a sense of what some of those new incremental features and functionality would be that consumers would really appreciate? Thank you.

Dara Khosrowshahi: Absolutely. So, Mark, in terms of ads, we’re very happy with the progress on ads. I’d say that we’re not surprised, because we’ve got a terrific team, both on the sales side and the tech side. And they have been executing what they promised. Now the biggest area of strength on advertising are still the smaller businesses that advertise on our platform. These are your neighborhood restaurant who wants to get increase their business by 20% and puts in a certain dollar amount into the Uber ad system that we bid on for them. These advertisers on average are earning eight times their spend. We got about 550,000 businesses now advertising on our platform. It’s up 75%. And that is the majority of our advertising revenue.

And it’s about bringing on more advertisers onto the platform or getting them to increase spend, if you’re making eight times your investment, while increase your spend from $200 a week to $300 a week to $400 a week. That is absolutely something that we’re focused on. And frankly, it’s in the interest of our advertisers, based on the return on ad sales that they’re seeing. Some of the faster growing areas of advertise — of advertising are with enterprise clients and CPG clients. Enterprise advertisers, sometimes they look for additional bells and whistles they want — they may want to target a certain demographic. They may want to target a certain daypart, for example, one of our big enterprise consumers wanted to target breakfast, as an example, or they may want to only bring on new customers who haven’t eaten at that establishment before.

So we’re building out much more mature tool set for those kinds of advertisers more reporting on incrementality of the ad spend as well. And then for CPG companies, especially in the grocery part of our business, which is one of the fastest-growing segments of the business, we built out, for example, sponsored items for grocery. These CPGs, they are advertising in Albertsons, they are advertising in the grocery shelves at this — right now. They advertise on Instacart. So essentially we’re rebuilding those kinds of products to get them in front of an audience and Uber Eats audience, that’s not only global, but it’s growing very, very quickly. So any CPG advertisers who wants a growing audience and a global growing audience should get in front of our audience.

And then, of course, there is our journey ads, which is advertising on mobile. These are people who are going out, who are impressionable, who may see kind of higher level branded, higher CPM brand advertising in the Uber app as well. That part of the business continues to grow, and that team had frankly a terrific Q4. When you look at membership, which we’re very excited about, membership, really have a bit of sprint at the end of the year. We had kind of holiday promos on free trials. We moved a bunch of our Uber One members to annual memberships that reduces kind of the turnover or increases the retention of the members. So right now, I’d say, the focus of the team has been launching in more countries, we’re in 25 countries, making sure that features like annual membership upsell that increased retention are available all over the world.

Next year, you will see some bells and whistles, I would say, more on the Mobility front in terms of surprising and delighting the customer if it’s an upsell or if you’re, let’s say, in an airport, but I want to save those surprises and delights [indiscernible] when we are ready to announce them, but stay tuned.

Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah: And maybe just to wrap it up, just put some numbers out there so that you have — again, 19 million members across the 25 countries that Dara mentioned. And again, I want to go back to the data he pointed out earlier, about 45% of our Delivery gross bookings is coming from members. So it is definitely driving the frequency, which is elemental to the growth algorithm.