Uber Technologies, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Brent and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Uber Q4 2021 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. If you'd like to ask a question, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, Again, press star 1. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Balaji Krishnamurthy, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Thank you for joining us today, and welcome to Uber Technologies' fourth quarter 2021 earnings presentation. On the call today, we have Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and CFO Nelson Cheh. During today's call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures, are included in the press release, supplemental slides, and our filings with the SEC, each of which is posted to investor.uber.com. As a reminder, these numbers are unaudited and may be subject to change. Certain statements in this presentation and on this call are forward-looking statements. Such statements can be identified by terms such as believe, expect, intend, and may. 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 except as required by law. For more information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements, please refer to the press release we issued today. as well as risks and uncertainties described in our most recent quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2021 and in other filings made with the SEC when available. Following prepared remarks today, we will publish the prepared remarks on our investor relations website and we will open the call to questions. For the remainder of this discussion, all fourth quarter growth rates reflect year-over-year growth and are on a constant currency basis unless otherwise noted. Lastly, we ask you to review our earnings press release for a detailed Q4 financial review and our Q4 supplemental slides deck for additional disclosures that provide context on recent business performance. With that, let me hand it over to Dara. Thanks, Balaji.

We had a strong quarter to close 2021 on a high note. Our results continue to demonstrate both how eager people are to move around their cities as restrictions ease up, and how delivery has become an important part of their daily lives. Gross bookings of $25.9 billion came in at the high end of our guidance range, with MAPCs of $118 million reaching an all-time high. Continued strong execution by our team delivered $86 million of adjusted EBITDA, nicely above our guidance range. In Q4, we continued to see strong recovery in our mobility business. December gross bookings nearly recovered to 2019 levels and approached a $50 billion annual run rate in the first few weeks of the month. Meanwhile, delivery volume stayed strong as we continued to improve the profitability profile of that business. Delivery reported its first adjusted EBITDA profit, including for the first time in the US, even as Uber Eats became the fastest growing delivery player in America. Uber Freight closed the transformative acquisition with TransPlace during the quarter. It's never been clear that our supply chains are in dire need of technical innovation. And along with TransPlace, Uber Freight, now at a billion dollar quarterly run rate, is well positioned to bring digital native change to the enormous logistics ecosystem. Looking back at 2021, we had a great year. I can't say it went exactly as I predicted, but our teams have shown an incredible ability to remain agile and manage through change effectively. Despite COVID and all of its unpredictability, we now have reported our second adjusted EBITDA profitable quarter, and we expect to generate significant and improvement profitability in 2022. Of course, COVID remains a part of our lives. We started to see some impacts of the Omicron wave late in December. The silver lining is that the impacts are becoming more muted as we learn to live with the virus. Lockdowns are less strict. and vaccines are available across the world. Omicron also arrived at a time of year when we usually see seasonal declines. So while mobility gross bookings decreased 21% from December to January, that's only about 10 points worse than what we typically see at this time of year. On a trip's basis, the decline was even more muted, down just 15% month-on-month, with pricing coming down meaningfully as marketplace balance improved. It appears that the Omicron impact on our mobility business has come and gone relatively quickly, even faster than the global case counts. We're beginning to see several major economies in Europe relaxing COVID restrictions, including the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway, with more countries expected to take similar action soon. In the last two weeks, the mobility recovery has rapidly resumed, with both trips and gross bookings recovering, and mobility gross bookings last week up 25% month-on-month. I'll quickly touch on driver supply, which continues to improve. We've made steady progress through product innovation, more targeted marketing, and on-the-ground operational refinements to onboard more drivers and couriers faster. Nearly 325,000 people started to work on Uber in the quarter, bringing our total global active earner base to 4.4 million people, the largest it's been since the second quarter of 2020. One important call-out is that while the Omicron wave acted as a temporary deterrent to demand, supply has been much more stable. As a result, surge and wait times have improved to their lowest level in a year. Recent internal research has shown that Uber is by far the preferred choice amongst drivers, and we're confident that our marketplace will be more, not less, balanced going forward. Turning now to delivery, which exceeded our expectations and performed better than we typically see in January, likely in part to Omicron. This relative overperformance has moderated just as the mobility trends have improved. Overall trends continue to be very healthy, and there's no question now that delivery is here to stay, both in food and other verticals. Delivery reached an important milestone in Q4, generating $25 million in segment-adjusted EBITDA and marking the first profitable quarter of many to come. As I said on our last call with you, we view the turn to EBITDA profitability as a big moment, but ultimately just a step along the way to creating a self-sustaining and incredibly valuable business. With this milestone accomplished, delivery is well-positioned to self-fund growth in grocery, retail, and local commerce. And let me underscore, We expect significant EBITDA profit generation even after those investments. Finally, it's worth spending a few minutes on a couple of our growth initiatives across the company. Our advertising business ended the year with around $225 million in run rate revenue, well above the $100 million target we laid out earlier this year. While much of the attention has been focused on sponsor listing for Uber Eats, we have a roadmap to build a much broader business, including in mobility. We also closed the acquisition of Drizzly during the quarter, which will be a nice addition to our advertising efforts. Our new vertical businesses, which includes grocery, alcohol, convenience, and other non-restaurant efforts, grew nearly 10% quarter-on-quarter in Q4 on an organic basis, reaching a best month ever in December. We continue to make progress in improving non-restaurant merchant selection in the U.S., And as a result, the U.S. grew at three times the rate of our global new verticals business during the quarter. Internationally, we continue to have a strong lead in grocery and other verticals. We're working to build on that lead with new quick commerce offerings, and we're intentionally taking a partner-led approach here with encouraging signs of adoption. For example, in France, Carrefour Sprint stores have represented nearly 20% of new verticals orders in Paris. and with significantly higher per store productivity than other new verticals merchants in market. Uber for Business also reached a milestone during the quarter with managed U4B gross booking surpassing its previous high from 2019 with well over a billion in annual run rate GBs. Over the next few years, U4B's enterprise offerings, which importantly spans both mobility and delivery, will significantly outpace our consumer business and become a meaningful contributor to growth and profitability. Before I hand it over to Nelson, plug for everyone to tune into our investor day tomorrow morning, which you can live stream on our website. Over the past few quarters, we've talked a lot about the power of the platform and the potential for Uber's complimentary services to contribute to lower cost of acquisition and higher lifetime value. We're looking forward to discussing our strategy, our plans for each of our business, and the growing advantage of our platform in a lot more detail tomorrow. Uber is emerging from the pandemic stronger than ever. As long as we execute on the opportunities in front of us, we're exceptionally well-positioned to deliver strong, profitable growth with significant expansion in profitability and cash flow generation over the coming quarters and years. Now, over to Nelson. Thanks, Dara.