Uber at Goldman Sachs Conference: Strategic Growth Insights

On Monday, 08 September 2025, Uber Technologies Inc (NYSE:UBER) shared its strategic vision at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi highlighted Uber’s platform evolution and growth strategies, focusing on integrating mobility and delivery services. While the company sees promising growth and engagement, challenges remain in expanding into less dense markets and leveraging autonomous vehicle technology.

Key Takeaways

• Uber is integrating mobility and delivery, creating an "everything app."
• Revenue grew 18% in Q4, with a 35% increase in the bottom line.
• Uber One membership has grown by 60%, exceeding 36 million members.
• The company announced a $20 billion share buyback, driven by strong cash flow.
• Partnerships in the autonomous vehicle sector are expanding, with multiple deployments planned.

Financial Results

• Uber reported an 18% revenue growth in Q4, with a 35% increase in net income.
• The company announced a $20 billion share buyback, showcasing confidence in its financial health.
• Gross bookings have grown by 18% every quarter for the past two years.

Operational Updates

• Uber is integrating mobility and delivery services, with a third of delivery trips originating from the mobility app.
• The Uber One membership program is a key driver, with members spending three times more than non-members.
• The company is expanding into less dense markets, with growth rates 1.5 to 3 times faster than in core markets.

Future Outlook

• Uber is investing in autonomous vehicles, with plans for several deployments in the US and internationally.
• The company is expanding its grocery delivery service, with a 35% increase in selection in the US.
• Uber’s partnerships with AV companies like Waymo are expected to expand its total addressable market significantly.

Q&A Highlights

• CEO Dara Khosrowshahi emphasized the importance of organic growth and strategic capital allocation.
• The management structure has been strengthened with Andrew McDonald appointed as COO to integrate mobility and delivery operations.
• Consumers are increasingly engaging with Uber’s services, with no signs of trading down despite economic pressures.

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for a comprehensive understanding of Uber’s strategic initiatives and future plans.

Full transcript - Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025:

Unidentified speaker, Host: Okay. I think in order to keep us on track, we’re going to get started with our next fireside chat. It’s always my pleasure to host Dara Khajra Shahi, the CEO of Uber Technologies. Dara, thank you so much for being part of Communicorpio Technology again. Happy to

Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO, Uber Technologies: be here.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Thank you. So look, to lay the foundation for our discussion, why don’t you talk a little bit about the evolution that the platform has been on over the last couple of years. And I’m sure we have a million topics we have to get through and only 35 to get through it. But why don’t you set the table for us in terms

Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO, Uber Technologies: of the evolution of the company, evolution of the platform? Yes, sure. So we’re very excited about where the company is and where we’re going in that we continue to be the only global player that’s running both mobility and a delivery marketplace. And in the early days there was a hypothesis that the two would help each other in terms of moving demand from one side of platform to the other side of the platform and then supply as well as drivers engaging on both sides of the platform. And I think as we’ve matured as a company, we see that hypothesis coming to life and coming to life in a way that advantages us versus our competition.

And it allows us to acquire customers from mobility, move them over to delivery, a third of deliveries first trips come from the mobility app and more and more we are going delivery to mobility as well. And if you open up your Uber app now, you will see it will look much more like an everything app which is both mobility and delivery in that same app as well. So the platform is coming together really well. And if you step back and you think about kind of the overall growth drivers of the business, there is a core business for us that continues to grow really well. For example, our mobility business in our top 20 markets on a global basis, mobility trips are still growing in the teens, delivery growth is very, very healthy as well.

And one area of growth that we’re seeing that is very encouraging is growth in from kind of the urban markets that has been our traditional strength to the less dense areas and growth in less dense markets tends to be anywhere from 1.5x to 3x faster than our core market growth. So that core business in the middle of big cities growing really, really well and then consistently expanding into these less dense markets as well, which is terrific. Then we have on top of that a set of growth bets portfolios. This is reserve and Uber for business and grocery and two wheelers and three wheelers etcetera. These are newer businesses that we’ve landed.

That portfolio of businesses is now does about $30,000,000,000 in gross bookings, growing faster than the core and now is responsible for a quarter of our first trips coming from these new businesses. So it’s not just about growth but it’s actually newer customers coming onto the platform. Then there is once we get kind of the core and the growth that we mix them together with the power of the platform so to speak that’s essentially moving riders, customers who use both Rides and Eats on a monthly basis or on a quarterly basis spend three times more than ones who don’t. And then on top of that we lock them in with membership as well. We got over 36,000,000 members going 60% year on year, members spent three times more.

So the cross platform monetization and membership really locks in these customers. Fourth big growth area for us is AV that I’m sure we’ll talk about going forward. It’s a trillion plus dollar TAM that’s being released for us. And then as we have all this growth, we’ve proven the ability to leverage our margins So we think that last quarter we grew top line 18%, bottom line 35.

I think we’ll continue to leverage the P and L that way and then of course we’ll try to deploy our capital smartly now that we have a ton of free cash flow as well. So that’s kind of the picture of the overall business. But the platform side, the ability for us to acquire new customers, have those customers interact across the platform is increasingly a big part of our business. We actually I brought on Andrew McDonald who has been with us for twelve years. He is one of the operational veterans of this company now as COO and President to really kind of run these operations with a single operator on top that I think is really maturing some of our platform efforts there.

So I’d say so far so good and we’ve had a couple of good years and I think we see a couple of good years ahead of Okay.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Lots of mine in there, but maybe picking up on a couple of those themes. With the appointment of a COO, talk a little bit about management structure inside the company and marrying vision execution,

Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO, Uber Technologies: where you want to

Unidentified speaker, Host: take the platform for longer term versus the blocking and tackling of executing every day?

Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO, Uber Technologies: Yes, listen, vision without any execution is no good and execution without vision at some point hits a wall, right. And I think having Mac on top of both businesses allows us to really push this platform concept much more aggressively. So just an example for folks, only one in five, less than 20% of our monthly active platform consumers use both Rides and Eats in a single month, right. So it’s only about 25%, Moving less than 20%, moving that up is enormous incremental volumes for us. So we think that our ability still to cross sell is significant.

On 30% of our mobility users. These are in countries where we have both mobility, both Uber and Uber Eats. 30% of Uber users have never used Eats. So for us to introduce that population to Eats is still enormous potential and enormous potential growth for Eats. And in the past, while we’re one company, kind of the P and L has gone the way, right.

You had two totally different operating leaders and ops teams etcetera, two different P and Ls. So we were constantly trying to make trade offs with those P and Ls. Now you have one individual along with Mac and then Prashanth, our CFO, who are making the trade offs between the two businesses really going after that next dollar growth wherever that growth comes from, whether it’s from mobility or delivery, actively trading off both. And then we have a number of the platform, big platform businesses now like our membership business, our AV business and for example our advertising business all reporting directly to Mac as well. So I think we’ve got the right kind of both operating setup and kind of when we step back the opportunity generally of all things on demand and AV and a bunch of the growth that we’re making, I think that kind of the road map that we have and the runway that we have is pretty significant.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Yes. I think one of the challenges I was run to in talking about the business with investors is that I think investors generally over index to frequency. So you talked a little bit about some of those stats that I thought were super interesting about pockets of the ecosystem that under index to frequency. When you think about level setting on frequency and behavior and driving more repeat behavior across the platform. Talk a little bit about some of the initiatives that are key to that and maybe wrap it around a little bit of a conversation of how Uber One can continue to evolve as a subscription product in the years ahead?

Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO, Uber Technologies: Yes, absolutely. So when we look at frequency, first we think the frequency now for us across our platform are all time highs and I think we will continue to hit all time highs hopefully for the foreseeable future. But there is very, very substantial opportunity there in that while our frequency across the platform is around six, our monthly active platform consumer uses an average of six times a month, about 50% of those consumers are only using our services one or two times a month versus if you think about our top 10% of freaking consumers, they are using our services an average of 15 times a month. So moving that 50% that’s only using us quite infrequently now to using us three to four times a month, to using us getting up to the average and then becoming the power user is a significant focus for us. How do you move that early lifestyle early lifetime consumer to a much more mature consumer.

So the opportunity we think to increasing frequency is very, very significant. In terms of how we are going after that opportunity, I’d say there are three big angles to it. One is probably four big angles. One is just keep focusing on the core and making sure that the product gets better. And by that I mean selection increases, the number of stores that we have on Uber Eats has increased by 14% on a year on year basis.

The more stores you have, the more choice you have, the better conversion of your users, the more they come back etcetera. Our error rates on Eats, the percentage of times when something goes wrong with the delivery are all time lows. So it’s very, very important. People can talk about a bunch of high pollutant things, but like first things first, which is every single year the core product is getting better and better and better. And if the core product gets better, we see people coming back to us more.

So I’d say that’s one. Second for us, the real focus is affordability. I’d say one of the criticisms that we have is some people say, it’s an expensive product that has never gone in the way of let’s say our growth. But we specifically have a significant work stream on affordability. If you look at mobility for example, our lower cost product, our two wheelers, our three wheelers are growing at very substantial rates compared to the whole business.

You are taking the cost of the vehicle down. Therefore you can take the cost of the ride down. Our wait and see product, our share product, high capacity vehicles are another way, get more than one person into the vehicle or get the person to wait a little longer, you can decrease price. Wait and save now is expanding to 30 plus countries, saves on average of 9% per ride as well. So again as you bring affordability down, you get more usage.

And then on the Uber Eats side, we have a product called merchant funded offers which is merchants can put in offers buy one get one free, spend $10 get something free etcetera. These merchant funded offers now are being redeemed at the level of $1,000,000,000 per quarter. So these are funding that comes from our merchants, gets handed over to our customers, merchants get kind of higher exposure in the marketplace as a result of this funding and it’s not something that comes out of our margin so to speak. So base business gets better, affordability, third for us is just more stuff. The more things we have on the marketplace it goes to what we’re talking about on the platform, the more services you have, the more customers use us.

And so for example with food, the addition of grocery, grocery users on Uber Eats transact substantially more for us than only online food delivery users as well. And then fourth for us is membership. We have the best membership program in the world just like Netflix has the best content. They have more content than other players which makes them the leading player entertainment membership. For us, we have more content than any other player because you get discounts on mobility and you get discounts on delivery.

Over 60% of delivery gross bookings now come from members. We’re focused now, we’re going to keep that going and we think we have more upside there, but we’re really starting to focus on mobility benefits as well. And one of the benefits that really seems to be resonating with our mobility users is essentially surge savings where they can our members can be protected against certain surge levels as well. That looks like it is a product that is resonating very, very well with our members. So I think there’s a lot of upside in terms of driving additional membership for mobility product that generally has been trailing delivery which has been doing incredibly well.

We got over 36,000,000 members. Our revenue from membership subscriptions now is over $2,000,000,000 now on a run rate. So it’s a strong business of itself and at the same time it really drives lock in and use of the platform where members spend three times more than non members retain at higher rates as you would expect as well. So I think the frequency kind of roadmap is a pretty strong roadmap for us and you will continue to see us kind of hit all time highs as we progress along this roadmap.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Okay. Maybe just one quick follow-up because you have been adding benefits to Uber One as membership over time elements across a lot of different partners in that ecosystem now in different industries other than the ones you necessarily operate in. How much of a living breathing membership is this? Like how far can it go in terms of like looking across ways to partner with other companies to create value for external parties as well as for your member base?

Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO, Uber Technologies: I think we’re very, very early in terms of the development there. Our membership program has only been around for call it five, six years. It is both relatively immature compared to its potential in terms of the features that we have and the partner ecosystem that we’re developing. And the good news is because of our global scope, because of the breadth of the product that we have, we are a leading kind of partner for all these players. And the benefit of these partnerships is that they tend to convert a higher percentage of low frequency consumers to membership.

So if you have a high frequency person who uses, who converts over to membership, if you’re already transacting seven or eight times a month for us and you become a member, there’s incrementality in terms of your use, but the incrementality is less than let’s say a Delta SkyMiles user who through our partnership with SkyMiles converts into a member as well. The incrementality of membership in terms of frequency, in terms of just incremental use or moving off of other platforms, we see higher in terms of some of these third party deals that we are making.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Okay. I wanted to turn next to the delivery side of house. This is a business that began anchored around food delivery and now in our view we have written about it becoming more of a local commerce business So talk a little bit about the drivers of growth as you expand beyond core food delivery into areas like non food delivery and grocery over time? Yes.

Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO, Uber Technologies: So I think the first thing again if you start with the core, the food delivery business, if you look at the penetration of for example the broad retail commerce category, broad retail commerce is in the mid-20s in terms of penetration of overall e commerce. Delivery is still substantially more immature than that. It’s probably in the mid teens. So I do think that the online food, the core food delivery business still has significant runway ahead of it and there’s no reason why it can’t penetrate just like overall commerce, if not more, because we certainly think the benefits could be higher. So the OFD business is growing at very, very high rates.

We’re very happy about the continued penetration and the growth there. On top of that obviously we see our grocery business as well. Outside of The U. S, we are in a position, we’re absolutely in a pole position to be the leader in terms of grocery delivery. In The U.

S, we’ve announced we’re very excited about improving our selection. Selection for grocery is up about 35% as far as number of stores, is accelerating over what we’ve had in the past. We’ve announced Dick’s Sporting is Good, Five Below, Dollar General, Family Dollar. So a lot of retail partners coming on to the platform and again as you improve selection, the product gets better, you get more audience, conversion goes up, it all adds up. So we’re very, very happy about both grocery and retail.

And then on top of that we have our direct business which is essentially delivery on demand for us to power retailers to build out their own front ends. That’s a business that is growing at very, very high rates, not profitable yet, we’re not running it for profit, we’re running it for growth, but we think there’s substantial opportunity there of kind of delivery of everything on demand. The pattern that we see is consumers value their time, their perceived value of time is only increasing and any time we introduce new products and kind of the reliability and the ease of using our products, we see consumers coming on to those products. So there’s a very, very long roadmap as it relates to grocery and delivery. Today the grocery habits that we see are more of a top up habit, which is call it $30 $40 $50 basket sizes versus the $100 plus weekly shop.

So we’re much more in the top up category. But what we’re seeing is two things, one is top ups as a percentage of the overall grocery category are going up because it’s just becoming easier. It used to be I used to be an appointment shopper, my wife and I would go to the grocery store once a week, once every two weeks and load up, where you can just kind of order just like with Amazon, it’s like I’ll order a single thing and press delivery there. With Eats, if you’re a member, get two or three things, it’s no big deal. So we’re seeing kind of top ups grow as a percentage of the overall category.

And we think eventually as you get more consumers embedded into our ecosystem, we can become that weekly shop and we can increase the basket size substantially. But right now the focus is just drive selection, just drive frequency within that top up area and then eventually you kind of the prime area for shopping.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Okay. I want to turn to the mobility business and just again talk about sort of the aspects that can compound growth. How are you thinking about elements of mature geographies versus immature geographies, the traditional product versus how the product is evolving, you talked a bit about affordability earlier. Talk a little bit about the building blocks of growth within the mobility business as you see it over the next couple of years.

Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO, Uber Technologies: Yes, absolutely. So I think first of all the core business is growing at very strong rates and even if we’re in our top 20 markets on a global basis on average are growing in the teens in terms of trips. So the core business is very, very healthy in an aggregate even in the large markets that we’re in. I talked about going into small markets, dense markets. These are the suburbs, they may be smaller cities, secondary, tertiary cities, growth rate substantially in excess of the core.

So I’d say that is one area of real effort. And then we have this barbell strategy in terms of high cost and low cost products. The higher cost products, the premium products are the reserve products, the Uber for business products, SUV comfort etcetera. Those products come with higher average purchase price and higher margins and we’re using the margins of that premium product to drive our more affordable products. We talked about two wheeler, three wheeler shares.

For example, one product that we’re pretty excited about is our price lock product. So you can go in, lock price and this is aimed at the commuter. And as you can tell, we can tell from trip patterns whether you are a commuter or not, when you leave in the morning, the predictability of the place that you go to. And as we identify these commuters and sell Price Lock to them, the commuter who buys Price Lock is taking six more trips per month than the commuter that isn’t. So there is a combination of both affordability and predictability that then drives frequency and brings us kind of those incremental trips as well.

And so it’s kind of this barbell strategy that we’re running. So overall margins are still very, very strong, but you’re adding a lot more growth to the overall ecosystem. Autonomous is obviously a huge, huge growth driver for us. So between kind of the base business growing well, the barbell strategy driving margins and growth, autonomous and then for us as I mentioned membership more is as we build out our membership ecosystem for mobility, think we will see more incrementality for mobility coming from membership as well.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Got it. I did have to smile because the app is getting quite good at predicting what I am about to leave my apartment head down the West Side Highway, We but focus on every

Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO, Uber Technologies: measure that which is like you it’s a one click ride.

Unidentified speaker, Host: It’s getting very good. I want to come back to the overall demand environment we find ourselves in. There still is a fairly robust conversation about the macroeconomic environment among investors. Can you level set what you are seeing in terms of demand across the array of products you bring to the consumer and the business landscape?

Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO, Uber Technologies: I think it continues to be quite encouraging in terms of demand. Obviously we’ve been growing GBs 18 plus percent every single quarter for the past two years. So generally our growth is very healthy with higher margins as well. So we don’t have to kind of buy our way into growth so to speak. I think across every level of consumer demand, we continue to see encouraging trends, which is frequency is all time highs.

We are not seeing consumers trade down in terms of the product that they are buying or the stores that they are shopping in or the restaurants that they are eating for. We are not seeing any signs of trading down. We are actively driving affordability of our products. It’s something we think that obviously gross bookings growth drives the bottom line, but high gross bookings growth with high trip growth is kind of the best solution for us. And for example, with our mobility business grow 19% the past couple of quarters, we see pretty consistent TV growth at least for the next couple of quarters.

So everything that we look at in terms of consumer demand looks pretty consistent with what we’ve seen in the past which is healthy. And remember for us there is we’re kind of hedged in terms of the economic environment, which is obviously in stronger economic environment we have more demand come in. The cost of labor tends to be pretty strong. But to the extent that the economies weaken and the labor market loosens up, that reduces the cost of our supply so to speak. So we get more supply into the marketplace, surge comes down, pricing comes down, which then drives demand as well.

So we have a pretty good hedge both in terms of strong demand markets and weaker markets. At this point, we are not seeing signs of weakness, but we are certainly looking around.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Okay, understood. So we have to talk about AVs. Why don’t I give you the floor to just level set what you have learned about the AV environment as it’s built in its momentum over the last six, nine months? And what you see as some of the disconnects between the way outsiders think about AVs versus maybe the way you guys as a company think about AVs? Well, I think we continue to see AVs as it’s just

Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO, Uber Technologies: a terrific product. It is we continue to see the development of the entire AI ecosystem and AV is a flavor of AI in the real world. These technologies are getting more mature. There’s a ton of investment going into all these technologies. The sophistication of these models is getting more and more powerful.

So in terms of kind of the development of the core tech, I’m more encouraged in terms of the velocity of the development of the core tech than I ever have been. It is happening and it’s happening in multiple places in China, here in The U. S, in Europe, companies are absolutely getting to the finish line. The product that we see and we’re working with Waymo who is I think best of breed in the world there, it’s a product that consumers love. So in the markets in which we have developed AV, the consumer willingness to pay a premium for the product has been a nice surprise, these are nicer cars.

I think consumers are willing to pay a premium for the safety that they have. Consumers rate the product at very, very high rates and we’re seeing the demand that we expected for the product which are the Waymo’s that we have in market now in Atlanta and Austin, they are busier than 99% of our human drivers as well. So we are able to drive really, really high utilization of the product and one of our core thesis was if you put your product on the Uber marketplace, your utilization is going to be excellent and the utilization that we see in the field certainly supports that assumption. The results that we are seeing are even better than our expectations as well. And then the real question for us is the cost of the vehicles, cost of hardware coming down and again we’re seeing very encouraging trends there, LiDAR which used to cost $20,000 $30,000 a pop, now solid state LiDAR coming out of some of the Chinese manufacturers is costing $300 $400 per LiDAR as well.

So the affordability of hardware is moving absolutely in the right direction. We have over 20 partnerships now with various AV partners. We just announced a new one, Momento, which is a player out of China actually in Munich. So Europe is certainly open to this technology as well. And I think even this year you are going to see four to five deployments both in The U.

S, two in The U. S. And Texas, AvRide and Main Mobility and then two deployments outside of The U. S. As well.

So you are seeing this technology in the street, this technology that our users love and we are quite confident that it’s going to be a significant TAM expander for us.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Okay. We only have a few minutes left. When you take all the growth initiatives you have talked about so far, how do you as a management team think about balancing incremental margins and delivering on the margin targets you have talked to investors about against making sure you are getting the balance right in support of all these growth initiatives? Well, listen, I think to some extent it’s an art and not a

Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO, Uber Technologies: science, right. There’s always a debate as to how much growth can we drive, how much margins can we drive and there’s always a trade off between the two. I think we have largely gone right as a company. And I think the good news for us is we are in a position because of the leadership position that we have in most of the markets that we operate in both mobility and delivery, because of the platform advantages that we have in a unique business model and the global scope and the scale that we have, we’re in a position to be able to drive both top line and bottom line, very healthy top line and leverage our margin as well. So we haven’t gone to that point of let’s say painful trade offs where you have to kind of choose one or the other.

We’re able to deliver both and we gave our investors kind of a three year growth formula that we talked about and we’re well on our way to hit those targets as well. And I think that now Andrew McDonald coming out coming in as President and COO is actively, we are making active trade offs between mobility and delivery which was harder to do in the past because again we had those businesses separate. So I think we can continue to grow the business and grow our margins for the foreseeable future. Don’t see an end to that.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Okay. Last topic before we close out, just capital allocation. You have been on a bit of a journey and you are returning more capital to shareholders. When you look at the balance sheet you have, the scope for the potential return capital to shareholders, the scope to invest in growth initiatives, what are the right priorities that are your focus points and how might those priorities shift in the years ahead?

Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO, Uber Technologies: Well, think growth initiatives are always going to be organic growth initiatives are going to be top priority for us. We are actively investing in the business. There are many new initiatives that we are taking on where we are losing substantial sums of money and I consider that a good thing, right. So it is we’re constantly having pockets where we’re leveraging on profitability and plowing it back into newer businesses that we’re trying to grow. So organic growth comes first in terms of our priority.

Second area that we’re looking at is the AV space, right, in terms of funding new and promising players in the AV ecosystem, making commitments, let’s say, to elucid for thousands of vehicles. And again, we’ve got the balance sheet and cash flows to continue to make those commitments. And I do think that as the AV economics and the ecosystem matures, many much of those balance sheet investments that we have made have the opportunity to be financed by third parties going off balance sheet. But in the short term and medium term where appropriate, where we can get an advantage, where we can drive growth, will be aggressive with our balance sheet because we have substantial cash flows to fund these operations. Third, I’d say is M and A, opportunistic M and A and these will be more I would say tuck in tuck acquisitions.

For example, the acquisition of Trendyol Go in Turkey that so far has been an absolute terrific success for us. And then fourth of course is buybacks. And because of the cash flow generation of the company and we’re growing, we’re going to grow margins, cash flow, free cash flow is only going to improve over the next couple of years that gave us the confidence to announce a $20,000,000,000 buyback. When we announced buybacks, we actually follow through on those buybacks. But it gave us the confidence to announce that buyback knowing that our free cash flow generation would be able to get through that kind of a buyback, but at the same time have plenty of capital left over for organic and inorganic opportunities as well.

So I think the company is in a good place and we think the stock is a great opportunity as an investor. We know the company really well. And I think that effective capital allocation over the long term can be a real booster in terms of stock price value and we think we can definitely deliver that boost.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Okay. Well, Dara, thank you again for coming and being part of the conference. Please join me in thanking Uber for Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

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