Uber (UBER) Q3 2026 earnings call transcript

Uber (UBER) held its earnings call for the third quarter of fiscal 2026 on 4 November 2026. What follows is my machine transcription of the company's public webcast, made on 4 November 2026, and not the company's official text.

A machine mis-hears names and numbers, so where one reads oddly, the webcast is the record. This recording is not split by speaker.

Transcript

♪ ♪ ♪ Hello and welcome to Uber's Q3 2026 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. And if you would like to ask a question during this time, please join us here today. If you would like to ask a question during this time, please press star one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to turn the conference over to Alex Wong, head of investor relation.

You may begin. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you for joining us today and welcome to Uber's third quarter, 2026 earnings presentation. On the call today, we have Uber CEO, Dara Kajarsahi, and CFO, Biology Krishna Murphy. During today's call, we'll present both GAP and non-GAP financial measures. Additional disclosures regarding these non-GAP measures, including a reconciliation of GAP to non-GAP measures are included in the press release, supplemental slides, and our filings with the ICC, 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, accept this required by law. For more information about factors that may cause actual results that differ materially from forward-looking statements, please refer to the press release we issued today, as well as risk and uncertainty describes in our most recent form 10K and in other filings made with the ICC.

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 will open up calls to questions following brief, opening remarks from Dara. With that, let me hand it over to Dara. Thanks, Alex. Q3 was another strong quarter of growth and expanding profitability for Uber with record, audience, and engagement across our platform. We reached 215 million monthly active platform consumers who are using Uber more frequently than ever.

That helps us deliver our fifth consecutive quarter of 20+ year over year growth bookings growth alongside 35% growth in non-GAH EPS and record trailing 12-month free cash flow of 10.4 billion. Mobility continued to see healthy growth, but came in below our expectations as a result of driver supply not keeping pace with strong consumer demand in several international markets. We're responding with targeted investments to improve driver availability and marketplace balance, and we saw encouraging improvement in October.

Our focus is on driving consistent growth while maintaining strong profitability of the business. Delivery had another excellent quarter with growth bookings up 23% year over year and organic growth accelerated. Our investments in selection, affordability, and reliability are making Uber eat even more useful for everyday occasions from restaurants, meals to weekly groceries, and last-minute essentials. And what approximately 55 million Uber 1 members were deepening consumer relationships across both mobility and delivery. Those direct consumer relationships are central to approach to AI.

We're using AI to make everyday transactions simpler and discovering more personalized while selectively exploring new distribution channels that can bring incremental demand. In ADs, our focus is shifting from partnerships and testing to driverless commercial service. We're excited for Zeus to launch on Uber in Las Vegas later this month with motional moving up to fully driverless operations soon thereafter. We're focusing on the cost of the pandemic and the cost of the pandemic. We're focusing on the cost of the pandemic and the cost of the pandemic.

We're focusing on the cost of the pandemic and the cost of the pandemic. Before I headed off to the operator, I did also want to offer a special thanks to Jill Hazel Baker, our president and chief corporate affairs officer. After 10 years here at Uber, she's moving on to open AI. It's a big win for them. It's a loss for us to lose someone like Jill. She's been such a big part of our culture, our company.

But fortunately, she has built a great team who get to step up to more senior positions, many of them working with me directly. So I want to personally thank Jill for her 10 years here. She's helped me in innumerable ways, both professionally and personally as well. She's been a great advisor. It's a big win for open AI. And I'm really glad that the team that she built is ready to step up to bigger positions, which they fully deserve at the company.

So big, thank you to Jill. And with that, I will turn it over to the operator for questions. Great. Thank you. Your first question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Thanks so much for taking the question. I want to come back to the parts of the letter prepared remarks around AV fleet financing. Can you go a little bit deeper in terms of how we should be thinking about the balance sheet?

And incremental free cash flows that you want to put behind these efforts? And how should we be thinking about rates of return or aligning the economics with the commercial opportunity? Thanks so much. Thanks, Eric. I can take this. So I think, you know, we aren't ready to say a lot on the structures that we are working on just yet. But what I would point you to is the billion dollar financing arrangement that we had set up with Santander earlier in the year that was focused on our traditional fleet partners.

That is a template for what we could be doing with our AV fleets as we go through the next few months. We are actively working on these kinds of setups. And specifically, you should expect that we will have announcements to make both on infrastructure financing but also on vehicle financing as we go forward. So our long run expectation is that this should be financed by third party capital, not by Uber's balance sheet. And, you know, in the near term, as you've seen with the announcement that we had in the release that we will have about 700 driverless vehicles on our network this year, 2000 by the end of next year.

The, you know, capital deployment against those is fairly limited. But as we start scaling out into the 10,000 plus territory in 2028 and beyond, we want to bring in third party capital against that and we feel good about the ROI that the third parties can get there. And they're just a little bit more for me, which is we do think that fleet financing for these cars is going to be someone unusual in that if you look at like fleet financing for rental car fleets, et cetera, they're all based on residual value of vehicles.

And I think the residual value of AV vehicles isn't established yet. And so as a result, in the early days, we're going to take these vehicles on our balance sheet. We have a very strong balance sheet, are capable of doing so. And I think a lot of the fleet financing is going to be based on revenue, kind of revenue potential of these fleets. And what we're able to demonstrate is that cars on our network get very, very high utilization and actually higher utilization on cars that aren't on our network.

You know, we show a 30% kind of utilization premium on our network. And we're able to do so very flexibly. So, you know, if there's a fleet that for some reason fails in terms of their operations, we can take that AV vehicle and put it under separate ownership. And it will still earn on the Uber network, so to speak. So, we think that the financing on the Uber network can have a real advantage in terms of cost of capital versus alternatives.

And it is kind of a business model that we're working with to establish with partners. The reaction has been actually, you know, they're quite interested. They want to diversify away from data centers, so to speak. So, we're quite optimistic on it, but we do have to establish the business model, the utilization advantages, demonstrate that to the banks and then go from there. Next question, please. Your next question comes from Nikhil Devnani with Bernstein. Your line is open.

Hey there. Thank you for taking the question. I wanted to follow up on the international supply dynamic you called out. Just want to make sure, did something sort of change through the quarter? I think last time we had talked about Brazil, but it seems like there's a few more markets that are now reflecting this. So, if you could just elaborate on what you saw through the quarter, that would be helpful. And then also, as we look forward, how should we be thinking about the supply side investments required?

Because some of the variables called out like immigration feel a little bit more persistent. So, it would be helpful to understand just the degree and persistence of these investments as you try and re-accelerate the business. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you, Nikhil. So, I think what I would say is a lot of this is a continuation of the dynamics that we have seen through the year. And if you zoom out and look at the macro environment with the escalation in the war in the Middle East, fuel costs impacts have been felt globally.

Where it shows up most materially for us is in emerging markets, where there is a level of price sensitivity on both the consumer and the driver side. And what we talked about last quarter in Brazil was specifically focused on motor supply from delivery competition in the market. So, through the last quarter, we have seen the elevated fuel price impact in markets like Brazil and India, in particular, quite meaningfully impacting the supply situation. Similarly, the immigration dynamics have been in place through the year.

But as we go through the back half of the year and we see elevated demand from the holiday season that you have coming through right now, which, again, the demand picture is pretty strong. We see an elevated impact on the supply on the marketplace when the supply is short. So that's kind of what we're calling out in Canada as well. Now, this is a good problem where, you know, we are at the scale that we are operating at and we still are running into supply constraints rather than demand constraints.

And we know exactly how to address those kinds of challenges with the history that we have demonstrated. We're making targeted supply investments. So this is focused on driver acquisition, retention and engagement. And as we go through that kind of investment, we are already encouraged with the early signs of supply improvement we saw in October and supply our growth globally accelerated in October, including notable improvements in Brazil and India. So I think, you know, with all of that, you see our outlook, which is steady at the 18 to 22% growth range, which is steady from the last couple of quarters.

So we feel good about where we are. And the growth runway in front of us is extremely long over the last five years, we have doubled our eligible population penetration in our top 10 markets, but it's still at only 10%. Right. So we feel really good about where we can go. I think just the additional factor that we are dealing with is that we obviously have a year over year pressure on supply, but then we also have seasonal pressure on supplies law, which is September, October, November, December are kind of peak season for us, both in mobility and delivery.

And in some markets like Brazil, mobility and delivery depend on two-wheel supply, which for us is, for example, one of the examples of supply that we need to add. So those kind of intermingles. So it's a seasonal issue, and it's a year on year issue that are hitting together. We've got a good handle on it. We're very optimistic about the trends as we seem in October and going into Q4. And again, this is not the first time we have dealt with this kind of situation.

Next question, please. Your next question comes from Brian Nolock with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Great. Thanks for taking my questions. Maybe one on grocery. Just talk to us a little bit, Phil Southley, about the investments you need to make in grocery and retail to sort of further accelerate and compete that, compete in that business in the U.S. And how do you think about the need to have a larger 1P presence, so your own dark stores or your own sort of fulfillment operation?

Yeah, absolutely, Brian. So we're very excited about the progress of a grocery and retail business, where, you know, run rate now at $15 billion, run rate growing 40% on a year on your basis. You know, we think this is like a $10 trillion, so it's an enormous market for us. And what we see from consumers is over and over is, you know, they want more stuff faster. They want everything faster. You know, I think when Amazon brought overnight shipping, it was magic.

And now, you know, next hour shipping is magic, and pretty soon people are going to expect everything in 15 minutes. And we play right into that area. You know, the areas of investment for us are really about selection. They're about affordability, and they're about kind of consumer experience. You know, on the selection side, we're very excited to expand to Costco nationwide. We also have added a number of international players, Target, Decathlon, Priceline in Australia, Tesco in the U.K. They're really in Germany as well.

So we continue to invest in selection. And as we add selection, we have more consumers coming online as well, and also conversion rates improved. We continue to invest in affordability, whether it's Freshoff Tuesdays or, for example, members not having any fees above 60 bucks that our members are loving as well. And then we continue to invest in product innovation as well to make sure that, you know, our pick pack is as accurate as it can be shopper or investing in shopper quality.

So we are paying high quality shoppers more. And we're also introducing technology, for example, where our shoppers will take a photo of an empty shelf to verify that, you know, the item that you're looking for isn't there. It also helps our consumers too, because when they see the empty shelf, they don't get upset. It's not the shoppers fault. It's just what they want. It wasn't there. And so it helps establish trust between both sides of the marketplace.

So for us, it's just all about execution. You know, as it relates to dark stores, our number one priority has been to work with our partners and to help them grow their businesses. Now we're very excited as it relates to delivery hero, they have built a substantial quick commerce and dark store business. And the benefit of dark stores is that you have a much better handle on inventory. Usually your pick and pack success percentages, your found rates are much higher.

So quality goes up as a result of the vertical integration. And, you know, this is a part of the delivery hero, hopeful potential acquisition that we're very excited about. That team has been building the quick commerce business for, you know, well over, you know, seven, eight years. It is, it hit break even. It is growing at very attractive rates. And we're very excited to add that as part of our portfolio. Once we close the on delivery hero and just one additional comment on the dark store question.

This is for us fit for purpose sort of solution, right? We will not. We don't want to get into this business everywhere, but there are markets where it makes sense. As Tara mentioned, the delivery hero has done a really good job with their dog so footprint in the Middle East. We are also, you know, in a position where we would be able to look at that business in Turkey, both with our existing presence in the market, but also with the gear.

Transaction that we have done and that business again is running near profitability and then we have organically experimented with this and in Taiwan as well. So ultimately it needs to be a business that can be run well, has to meet the market conditions and has to have a good return on assets when when you go into that sort of a field. So we'll be selective in their being engaged with this, otherwise we would work with our grocery partners who are experts at doing that in their own space.

Next question, please. Great. Thanks for taking the question. I want to ask a little bit more about the fully driverless, you know, roll out from 700 this year to 2000 next year. Just help us understand how it's on the geography, the technology pace of rollout. I think you said 50, 50 in the U.S. international and how you're thinking about that. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. So we're very excited. I mean, we got launches, obviously we're in market with Waymo already in the U.S. where market with we ride and buy do with no drivers in a number of international markets.

We expected launch zooks and emotional as we mentioned in Vegas this year. And then next year, we expect to add neuro in California and then in Houston as well in Texas, at least early on in 2027. These are fully driverless commercial rides and ab ride in the middle of the year in Texas as well. And internationally, we expect to add pony and memento to our no vehicle operator kind of inventory. You know, in late 27, I do think we are going to be doing kind of testing rods, vehicle operator testing rods with NVIDIA with Rivian, hopefully with Wabi as well, and also wave outside of the U.S. So, you know, there's going to the partner strategy and the monopoly of all these partners are really going to start adding up and we're quite confident of getting to the 2000 vehicles in 2027.

But the real goal is to get to tens of thousands of vehicles in 28 and beyond and really scaling the ecosystem. And, you know, we are in market in these markets. We have relationships with the cities. We have operations in those markets. We don't have to build demand. The demand is already there. So we think we can launch very quickly at very high utilization for our partners, which makes us even more optimistic about the opportunity here.

Next question, please. Sure. Your next question comes from a keturia with Wolf Research. Your line is open. Hello. Perhaps your line is on mute. Can you hear me? Yes. Sorry about that. Thank you for taking my question. Let me try to please the first is on a unit economics. So, in the illustrative example that you gave 30% increase in pay trips with a, you know, 23% decrease in fixed costs. And even if partners were to pay the transaction fee or take rate to Uber, that would still be.

So the additive to them. So my question is, how durable is that 30% increase in pay trips that you would add? How durable is that advantage as you think long term in AV? And then the second question I have is on just your capital allocation strategy. You talked about that in your letter. There's no change there in terms of your priorities. And you don't expect M&A further M&A until the year end or after. But I guess, how are you?

What was the rationale for easy cater? How are you thinking about capital allocation in general when you think about mobility and delivery as well as AV going forward? Thanks a lot. Sure. Thanks for that. I'll take the first one. I was going to jump in on the second one. So on the utilization lift, I would stop by saying we believe it's a very durable advantage for Uber. And maybe just for context, when we're talking about the 30% lift here, we are comparing Uber's deployments on a hybrid basis in the US with mature 1P deployments, right?

And these mature 1P deployments have the advantage of mixed that in that they include San Francisco, which is a uniquely favorable market for AV deployments today. As that deployment scale broadens out, we expect that 1P deployments will likely have utilization that will be worse than what they're seeing in San Francisco. And in fact, what you're seeing on the ground today is exactly that both for Waymo and Tesla, their trips per vehicle per day in the new markets that they have launched this year is in the low team versus high 20s that we are seeing on our network in these hybrid markets.

And effectively, you're looking at 100% plus utilization for us in those markets. I think the other part of this is we are also going to likely have advantages on additional pieces of the unit economics pile. First, the vehicle costs over time are going to come down. And that will be true for many players, but in general, what we are trying to ensure here is that as we work with OEMs, we want to ensure that we have line aside to advantage pricing that we can deliver because we have scale.

Second piece that we will have advantage on also is on share charging maintenance and fleet infrastructure, since that can be shared across multiple EV partners. Those on-prem data centers that were serving one one coffee. So I think those two pieces in addition to the utilization will support long term economics. Our goal is for a be trips to deliver margins comparable to human driven trips over time. And as we get beyond that kind of point, we can share savings with consumers and truly expand beyond what we're already seeing on the ground.

And in terms of capital allocation, et cetera, our priorities haven't changed. Obviously, our number one priority is to drive organic growth. Investment in the AV ecosystem, we talked about a $10 billion commitment based on certain deliverables, both an investment in partners and/or AV fleets, et cetera. That's another priority. And then there's M&A and buybacks as well, and we have plenty of capital for both. We are going to shift to, I would say, more of the top two, and we're going to pull back on M&A chiefly because we're really focused on integration of the deals that we've announced.

Generally, they're performing great, but we want to make sure we get the right cost of capital as it relates to M&A. And if you look at kind of our M&A philosophy historically and going forward, it's really in a couple of categories. One, you'll see deals that expand our geographies, right? Do they allow us to offer our services in more countries? Delivery hero is an example of that. Trendy all goes and is an example of that. And not only do we get into new geographies that are growing very, very fast, but it allows us to offer the platform advantage, the power of the platform, which is mobility and delivery, cross promoting each other, membership programs, cross promoting each other.

We're in more countries. So we're in many, many of the delivery hero markets where many, many of the delivery hero markets, and it's just the extension of our platform geographically. So in our primary, we look at what are capabilities that we can build that are specialized and we think really profitable. We talked about our premium business growing, and we talked for example, it's grown 35% year on year, and our U4B business grew almost 50% year on year.

The theme for us and corporate businesses, the theme for us, is something that we want to kind of double down on. And those, for example, are the acquisitions of black lane and easy cater that you asked about. You know, black lane gives us more specialty, very high quality inventory, and easy cater has specialized capabilities. You know, they only work with merchant partners who focus on catering. A lot of times the delivery partner has to come into the office, set things up.

It's a different level of service. And there's a huge advantage in being able to offer both black lane and easy cater to our U4B audience, which I think now we've got like half of Fortune 500 companies now as well. So those are established businesses, different capabilities, and we can introduce our U4B audience and really embed with them even more. And then third is kind of new products that can grow with our audience. So spot for your example of that.

We want our product to be more relevant, for example, to commuters. Commute is one of our largest categories. And to be able to offer commuters, you know, and Uber to work a pass to avoid surge and parking if they want it when they want to drive is a great, for example, example for us building out our inventory. Our inventory of services to the commuter was a top customer for us. So those are the themes that we're going after.

We're really excited about the acquisitions that we have on our books. We're very excited about easy cater. And generally, at stand-alones, they are operating at higher levels than our deal cases. And now we just want to make sure that the integration is right. The teams are treated well and everything goes well, which is why next year I think the focus is going to be more on organic. Autonomous. And then, of course, five backstop opportunistically. I just said that from a problem standpoint, for any deal that you see us do, we are always evaluating the build versus buy case.

And we're looking at the accretion math relative to what it would look like if we just bought back our own stock. In this specific case, specifically about easy cater, the build versus buy math could not be more obvious. We are talking about acquiring a business that is profitable right now. We have more synergies coming. And relative to building this business, we expect that you would see a few hundred million dollars of profit swing in the build case versus buy.

So, I think, you know, we feel very good about the logic and we now are focused on executing against it. Next question, please. Your next question comes from Michael Morton with Moffett, Nathan, you're line is open. Good morning. Thank you for the question. I wanted to maybe talk about the potential combination of DoorDash and Instacart. Uber has talked a lot about the cross-platform success you experienced from your eights to your mobility business. So, let me if you could talk about the potential opportunity that you see created by this combination.

Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. So, I don't think, honestly, Michael, it's going to affect us too much. Our grocery retail business is growing. You know, it's a $15 billion run rate growing 40%. Our focus really is to continue to improve the product. And the product still has a lot of improvement ahead of it in terms of selection, in terms of quality, in terms of on-time rate, in terms of fill rates, et cetera. You know, when we talk to our merchant partners, they want choice.

They want to develop direct channels. They want plenty of partners, including us and DoorDash and Instacart to work with. So, this potential deal takes one of those partners off the table. And we've already had kind of reach out from our partners, you know, both who are very worried about the potential transaction and asking us, what do you think? And then, two, wanting to actually work with us more, wanting to build their business with us so that they are not overly dependent on a single platform if DoorDash and Instacart happens, which will be a very, very large percentage of the online market.

But from our standpoint, the promise of this market is a $10 trillion market, you know, this would create a competitor that has a big share of certainly the online portion of that market, but we think for us, we're going to continue to invest in. And, you know, these acquisitions create a lot of distractions. And at this point, the reach out we've gone from merchants or merchants who want to embed with us more deeply and want to build their business with us so that they have alternatives.

And, you know, it's going to be up to the government to decide whether your alternatives or to alternatives is better. Next question, please. Your next question comes from Ken Dorelsky with Wells Fargo. Your line is open. Thank you. Two, if I may, please. First, could you talk about domestic or US mobility trends? Maybe what you saw in 3Q and into 4Q, you talked about improving mobility growth, but I want to see if we can touch a little bit upon what you see in the US versus some of the international markets you've talked about.

And in particular, I think there's a, there's a folk market focus on continued on California, but maybe even in some markets in Texas where there's been heavier A/B penetration. And the second question is, you talked about organic delivery acceleration. Could you talk about the drivers, you know, between kind of restaurants and grocery? Are you seeing core restaurant acceleration as part of that overall organic acceleration? Thank you very much. Yeah. Thanks, Ken. On the US for mobility, we are seeing relatively resilient growth in the US versus the international trends.

We talked about earlier in the call, you know, growth moderated a bit in Q3, but not as much as in the international markets. You know, integrated gas prices are an issue globally, and there is some level of supply pressure that we're seeing in the US as well, but we are responding with a targeted investment supply investments that we talked about earlier. I think beyond the supply question, what we are seeing in the US that continues to be true is the insurance tailwinds continue to build.

You know, we talked about the meaningful acceleration in California trip growth. They continue to outperform relative to the rest of the country to our barbell strategy on the product side continues to be really, really healthy in the US. The US barbell product grew at 3x the rate of the overall business in in Q3. And it's driven by strong innovation around world best portfolio, including made and safe. Comfort reserve black, but then also expanding to new demographics with teams and women preferences that are targeting just new cohorts of consumers and creating more options for our consumer base.

And then finally, from a sparse market standpoint, you know, we just see so much runway in the US. Less than 10% of eligible consumers in sparse markets have used Uber in the last 12 months. That number in dense markets is 50% of consumers. So, you know, we continue to make improvements on supply and reliability in these markets, and that that should have long-term impacts that are very favorable. Yeah, and we're quite pleased in terms of US delivery, which accelerated nicely.

It's a second quarter in a row that organic growth and delivery and US delivery accelerated and really is for a number of factors. One is mathematically our grosser and retail business and direct business, which are growing faster than our OFC business are becoming a higher percentage of the portfolios, so to speak. So you just have kind of a bigger, faster growing part of the business, getting even larger. Our core restaurant business is also accelerating, and that is because of really merchant selection, the number of merchants that we added in the US was up nicely about 12% on a year on your basis.

So as we add more selection, you know, everything helps conversion improves. We get new customers on the platform as well. Membership is definitely a win for us, so members are now 70% of delivery growth bookings, so membership is deepening in engagement with our consumers as well. And then, of course, sparse markets, you know, as Volody said, sparse markets is a play that we're running globally, but it's absolutely a play that we're running in the US as well for delivery.

That helps. And then last but not least, it is really deals. We are focused on kind of merchant funded promotions in addition to the membership discounts that we give to our consumers. If you look at our ad business and merchant funded promotions, they grew to over 10 billion on a year on your basis. And, you know, these are dollars that we're giving to our consumers in the return for merchants as, you know, new consumers and kind of higher penetration in the marketplace.

So all of it is working at this point. If there's one issue, it's it runs with mobility in that we continue to invest in delivery in careers to make sure that, you know, kind of our career growth keeps up with the consumer demand that we're seeing on the on the food side. That is right now the biggest challenge that we've got, but the team we think is more than up for. Next question, please. Your next question comes from Mark Mahaney with Evercore.

Your line is open. I just want to ask one question on the profitability of the mobility segment, these 8% margins you had this last quarter with the supply initiatives that you're introducing in international markets to that. Can you maintain the profitability performance that you've had or is it do we have a detour? Is it structural or is it a temporary detour or is there any detour just in those profit margins? Thank you. Yeah, Mark, I think I would just take you back to our philosophy as always, which is that we want to drive margin expansion for the total company on a year on your basis and ideally we want to do the same for the segments as well.

But on a quarterly basis, there is some variability in the business, both from, you know, just the investments we typically make in supply in holiday season, etc. So I don't, I wouldn't call out any kind of meaningful changes in the margin trajectory for the business. And, you know, we would have some color on, on just the Q4 supply investments for mobility that would have an impact on take trade, but not necessarily from a margin standpoint, anything meaningful.

Look, I think the final point I'd make here is on profitability. We are, if you look at our outlook, we delivered a quarter of mid 30% EPS growth. The Q4 outlook that we just provided at the midpoint is a 37% year on your growth on on our non gap EBS so if anything you're seeing the profit ramp expand. And that puts us in a pretty good spot for 2027 and Mark just a little bit more so so you understand the picture in terms of supply demand.

You know, we have base pricing for both kind of our consumer pricing and then base pricing for driver, career pay, etc. And then we have incentives and there are kind of call it rider side incentives, driver side incentives, eater side incentives, you know, then kind of courier incentives as well. These are more flexible dollars that we target times, you know, like Halloween, make sure drivers show up, etc. Or we'll target places. If we think that there's a ball game going on, we'll put incentives for drivers to show up to the ball game at the right time.

But the cool thing is that we just rebalanced incentives between riders and drivers, for example, in this case. And so whereas last year, more of the incentives went to riders to reduce price. Now this year we're taking down rider incentives and we're using those dollars to fund driver incentives. Now that does mean sometimes higher prices for riders, which is something that we watch out for. We will do trade offs against profitability, but that's something that we handle.

But there is a flexible incentive pool that we allocate to supply or demand based on the balance of the marketplace. And that's part of kind of the art that we've got. And then there's a lot of science algorithmic science that goes into a if you have a dollar, what is the maximum predicted return for that dollar. Should I get, invest that dollar in a driver in Brazil, or should I invest that dollar in a rider in India, for example, and the algorithms are making these choices and structurally can make these choices based on, you know, training on billions of trips.

And, you know, again, I'll keep these investments in a way that humans just can't. Thank you. Your last question, please. Your last question will come from Doug and this with JP Morgan. Your line is open. Thanks so much for the question. Something get your way to thoughts on AI agents. Can you just talk about some of the goals and differentiation that you can provide by building agent directly into the uber platform and then also how you're thinking about the opportunities on third party platforms like news and others.

Thanks. Yeah, definitely. So Doug, I think our focus is making sure that we invest for the best possible experience to become direct. You know, it's, it's price, your delivery time, reliability selection. Obviously, we have membership benefits and members now account for more than 50% of our booking to just build the best experience when you come direct. And we're really focused on making sure that the direct app experience is already frictionless, right? So like the mean ride time booking is less than a minute.

It's actually 50 seconds. That's how much time people spend on our app and 75% of our rides are a single tap based on personalizing, you know, your destination based on the data that that we have on you. You know, our mean, if you look at the meeting timeframe for an eater to reorder their favorite food, it's only 90 seconds. So we make sure that kind of coming to uber doesn't require a bunch of toil. You can get in.

You can get out. And because of the data that we have, you know, where you're going, when you're going there, et cetera, we think we're going to have a ton of people come direct to our site. And I used to work in a travel business where we're dependent on the Google's of the world. I don't want to go back there. So really kind of the best in class marketplace technology that we're building operational execution, I think is going to have more and more people coming direct to us.

And we are building our own AI experiences. You know, for example, we have a cart assistant, which we're very excited about. And early signal shows that baskets that you build with a cart assistant are roughly twice the average of the average basket as well. And we're working on kind of each assistant, driver assistant, et cetera, to make sure that AI kind of we have the best AI systems that can get you in and out of our services very, very quickly.

That said, we will have discussions with kind of third party AI agents. We think that it's another opportunity to reach our platform. We think it'll be a net positive in terms of demand into the ecosystem. And you can get based on kind of our services. There are a lot of every single AI system company is talking to us and we're really now negotiating the terms of trade. And the good news here is in most markets, you have two mobility, big mobility providers, two big delivery providers.

You know, I think I've counted now there are eight different assistants and I think there'll be more than 10 assistants. So, I think, you know, the content players in our space, in the physical space, we're kind of, you know, the fulfillment that demands on, you know, the services that we build are very large. I think the demands on our services are going to be very, very high. So something we're really excited about now, it's pretty small.

I think you were telling me, AI, what were the transaction values at this point? Yeah, so I think just to put numbers to it, we had one of our largest weeks last week because it was Halloween. So we did just around 320 million trips on Uber and Uber Eats. The volumes coming from AI agents for Uber Eats were around 500, 500 orders total. And for our rights business, it was a grand total of four trips that we've fulfilled from the agents.

So it's very, very early and very limited traction that we're seeing so far. Yeah, but so we hope that there will be more traction. Like we do think that we want to make services that are available to consumers in a delightful, easy way. We think our direct services are going to be almost delightful and easy, but we will work with these third parties. It's just very, very early, and we want to make sure we're not dependent on anyone player.

And I think we're very well positioned in this environment going forward. All right, well, I think that's it. Thank you, everyone, for joining. Thank you, Uber team, for everything that you've done to deliver a great quarter. We're excited to close out the year, hopefully, with a really, really strong quarter. And a big thank you to our investors and our owners who put their dollars and faith in us as a company. More to come. Thank you. This concludes today's conference call.

Thank you for joining. You may not disconnect.

Where this company stands

I read earnings calls because the companies I own are in them, and I publish the transcripts because the call itself beats the headline about the call. Whether Uber is one of the ten in the portfolio I run is a question for the Top 10: ten names a month, each with the case for owning it and the risks that would prove it wrong. Its page says what the list is, how to read it and how to get it.