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우버는 네트워크 효과와 규모의 경제로 수익성이 개선 중이며 배달·광고·Uber One 구독이 성장 동력이라고 주장. 소프트웨어 섹터 매도와 자율주행(AV) 우려로 주가가 눌려 있어 추가 매수 기회로 봄. 현재 소량 보유 중이며 AV 공포 등으로 더 싸게 진입하길 희망. 증권 분석 틀(EPS·PEG·CAGR)로 우버 저평가를 논거로 제시.
다듬은 글
Freaky Finance, where money talks and markets climb. Hey guys, Freaky Finance here. Today we're going to do a fun one that we haven't talked about for quite some time, Uber. So we did a video in 2024, I want to say around Halloween, on Uber. And we have owned it for a while during the COVID era. And we picked up more in 2022, and it worked out well.
Anyways, recently pulled back because software, I think, because it's in a software bucket. And we have seen, basically, whenever software gets killed, Uber's going down with it. That's very exciting because the business model continues to put up results like it has for the last 5 years. Especially under Dara's leadership, which we talked about on the channel when he used to work for Expedia.
Big fan of the CEO. Let's get into it. I do own this one again. I've just started a position again. It's not a full position yet, but it but it's slowly getting there. I'm kind of hoping that someone some type of fear happens, whether with it's with AVs or whatnot, and I can get an easier entry again.
But I do think this software panic is is still enabling us to pick up Uber relatively cheap, especially if we zoom out a few years. Another thing I just want to highlight that I haven't really talked about too much is defense. So I have started to put some money back into defense just because AMD has just gone up so much lately, Google's just gone up so much lately.
Broadcom hasn't gone up as much as I thought it would yet. It has started to appreciate. I'm kind of recycling things. So that's kind of like what we talked about is certain things like Geo Group being going up. I'm like, "Oh, I got to maybe to sell cuz it went up 50% really quick. I'm going to park it." And usually what I do is I park it in bonds, which we've done kind of videos on.
This is a different strategy with the bonds to make higher yield. But anyway, that's kind of how I I treat things. So So Uber, we talked about the network before and the flywheel that it has. So basically, you have the demand, the riders on one side, or the eaters if you're talking about food, and Uber Eats.
Then you have the drivers who deliver everything and drive you around. And you can see in the middle here is Uber. And Uber has a has a relatively high take rate on every fare. This is what the AI has taken, not mine, so I haven't cross-checked this. It sounds high. I think it will be depending on the region.
The AI didn't say that nuance, but it depends. And the take rate I think is relatively high. It's higher than Airbnb's when we did Airbnb's network video. And I also think the revenue breakdown is wrong here. I think it's actually really close on mobility and delivery. Delivery, and we're going to talk about those really quick.
Delivery has basically come out of nowhere. I'm actually going to show a snippet from 2020 just to show how quickly it's grown over the last 6 years. Freight we're not going to bring up just because it's so small. Uber One is critical. It's helping the flywheel for the both the mobility and delivery business.
And in the delivery business, you're also going to notice the the profitability profile is far has happened a lot quicker than mobility did. And that's a large part because of advertising. They've been advertising very well on the Uber Eats platform and it's leading to the bottom line and EBITDA, as we'll see.
So anyway, if we had to talk about the flywheel in a nutshell, if you get more drivers, which I think is critical, you get shorter ETAs. So basically just think if you have cars all over the world or all around your house or wherever, the closer they are to your house when you order it, the cheaper it's going to be for you, the quicker it's going to be for you, the user.
And technically the driver probably makes more money cuz they're closer, so they don't spend as much gas to get to you. It's It's a different kind of world and it's one of the reasons why Uber has, I think, conquered as quickly as it has. It's done a lot of things right, especially under Dara's leadership.
It's no longer in that infancy stage um with the prior CEO founder who, I think, had some shortcomings. Um so you have shorter ETAs, so you get less waiting, it's cheaper, leads to more riders, demand grows, which means you get more revenue, more richer data, you get lower prices cuz you can compete better cuz you're creating more revenue cuz the scale in the over the fixed asset base, which we'll talk about in a second.
That leads to more drivers, so you can entice more drivers as well. So So there's a lot of nuance here, but this is, in a nutshell, the network effect. And this is just AI's little thing. I thought it was kind of fun. So basically, if you're in a city that only has 500 drivers and the wait time is relatively high, right?
And there's no no real flywheel. But if you even just start 2,500 drivers, all of a sudden you see wait times more than cut in half, right? You get to 5,000 drivers, and you're only at 4 minutes instead of waiting for 15. So you can see the network effect in real time. And here you have revenue up 58 times up the base, but only 19 times more drivers.
So there's a lot of scale embedded on the drivers. So as long as they can keep attracting drivers, the business model will continue to do well, I believe. It's also outcompete in a lot of different areas. Uh it still is a lot dominated in the US and Canada. Really, it's uh a Lyft and Uber show here.
And in different areas, you're going to have different competitors. But, I will say overall, Uber is still severely underpenetrated in Europe, severely underpenetrated in the Asia Pacific region, severely underpenetrated in Latin America. So, there's a lot of room to grow. So, I know that like how long could Uber keep growing 20%?
Even though they're all modeling for Uber to only grow like 14%. But, anyway, there is a lot of opportunity here. And this is a scale game. So, the bigger they get, the easier it gets. I mean, the quicker they can support new launches in new areas as well with the resources that they're harvesting already in the US.
I do think they use that. We don't need to go into the business models or the segments too much. But, basically, mobility, most people know, just connecting the independent drivers with the consumers seeking point-to-point transportation. Still growing 20% year-over-year. Delivery is one which is which is really special.
And they are expanding quite a bit. Like, instead of just fast food or something, you're now getting groceries, you're getting retail apparel, you're getting consumer electronics. I'm getting targeted for my cat for dog food. There's there's there's a lot of things. There's also alcohol and pharmacy essentials, convenience stores.
They've been branching out really quickly into different offerings. And it's starting to show up in the numbers, I think, over the last 5 years. And this is just an example of them branching out on the mobility side. Whereas, when I first downloaded Uber, it would have been, I don't know, more than a decade ago.
Really, all I had was Uber and UberX, I think, and UberXL. And I think black was just coming out or something like that. But, anyway, you can see all the different offerings now. And the thing is the low cost. So, these low tails here where you have kind of outliers like uh scooters or moto or trains or shuttles.
Or in London, you're able to order the boat over on the River Thames. So, anyway, low cost and premium products drive about 25% of first mobility users. So, basically, if they offer these type of things, they're more likely to get new users, which is pretty special. And you do need more and more users on the platform again for that network scale.
And the network scale does show up in the numbers. 3.1% in non-GAAP operating income to 3.5. This has gone up materially since start of following this company almost like clockwork just slow steady. It just basically proves out the business model. The bigger it gets the more margins expand which is indicative of the flywheel effect that we talked about.
Mobility segments does bounce around quite a bit. You can see the last quarter was was relatively strong 7.7% on mobility. Mobility is kind of interesting and there is some UK noise in here from this quarter that maybe we'll talk about maybe we won't but you are seeing again continued strength across the board 20% growth in gross bookings as well as slow steady margin improvement over time.
One of the fun things when I guess we will talk about the UK is historically Uber's been about the COGS have been about 60% of revenue. So basically that that's like your courier payments or incentives. Historically it's been around 60%. However, you can see here in this latest quarter there's a 606 million decrease in COGS or driver payments and incentives because they recorded net revenue instead.
So in the revenue line they actually subtracted it. So that's why revenue growth looks slower in Q1 was because of this big accounting change. Basically instead of driver payments in COGS they actually had to have the driver payments inside the revenue number which is interesting but you can see the margin profile that's technically looks like it improved on a COGS side but that's because the revenue growth was lower.
So anyway, you are still seeing scale over time even with that revenue noise cuz all these other ones so aren't affected favorably by it would have been affected negatively by the revenue growth rate slowing because they're subtracting driver payments for the UK from that area. Over the long run you've just seen continued scale on operations and support and I'm going to show you the trend in a second as well as in sales and marketing though that is lumpy.
You can see in Q1 this year they actually shot up sales and marketing higher than the revenue growth rate and that's one of the things when you're the big dog is that you can afford to shoot up marketing to get share quicker to expand quicker. And again this is network effect. It's really getting in front of people, getting the drivers, getting the the riders and you're seeing material scale on R&D over time as well as well as G&A.
Ultimately when your revenue is growing 20% and your depreciation is only growing 1 this is a capex light model which is another thing we like as as as you're obviously scaling on the the balance sheet which we haven't talked about at all, but the balance sheet's also relatively immaculate like most tech unicorn darlings they were financed through venture capital for most of its growth, so they avoided debt.
Anyway, delivery just crazy growth. Just imagine going from 20 billion to 25, 26 billion in a year. At the same time, your revenue growth rate's accelerating while the margins are accelerating and you're also getting, I think this this is the advertising revenue is really showing up in driver or delivery quicker than I think people were expecting.
Even even 5 years ago, I wouldn't expect delivery to be at 3.7%. It's not quite at mobility's level, but it's getting there quicker than I thought they would. And this just for context, this is 2020 when I first started looking at this company when they had some layoffs. It was COVID panic. I mean, no one's driving around, things are shut down, but people had to eat and they had to eat from home.
So, Uber pivoted really hard in 2020 and you can see that in the grocery here going from 3 billion to to 7 billion and that's a year-over-year number. So, so really quick they just really focused. This is with less people cuz they let people go. Really focused on delivery and Uber Eats and basically out of nowhere, right?
Even then, even with the scale, you still had negative EBITDA. Delivery wasn't profitable in 6 years ago and now it's a billion dollars profitable a quarter. Just like that, 6 years boom. And that's one of the things I think is mis-modeled with this company is the continued growth not only in the top line, but on this operating income especially with advertising, especially with the Uber One subscriptions over time.
We'll talk about the balance sheet real quick, but you can see relatively immaculate. They have a decent amount of cash. They also have a lot of investments. We talked about that I think more on the channel a few years ago cuz they had write-downs and so it was putting pressure on the stock I thought and it made it easier for me to buy it.
It's not Uber, for the for the record, isn't as easy as a buy as it was in 2022, but it is I own it for a reason and I'm slowly trying to get into it if people will sell it to me at a cheaper price, but you don't control that. That you can't see they have taken on debt, but again in terms of relative to their cash and their investments, it's easily covered.
In terms of the cash flow, what are they doing with the cash flow? A few years ago, I couldn't even say that when I started started following this company. Didn't have any. Now, you're starting to see them return a lot to shareholders through buybacks. So, they generated 2.3 billion in the quarter and they bought 3 billion worth of shares in the quarter.
So, they have accelerated their share buybacks, which is nice to support the price at this specific time when SoFi is under fire. They're likely getting a discount than they likely otherwise would have. Uber One, we'll talk about this metric in a second, but basically, the more Uber One memberships they get, those users spend three times more than anyone else.
So, they're way more active on the platform and you get obviously the Uber One subscription money as well if you're the company. So, I do think Uber One is sticky, it's amazing and it's worth it, especially for the users like me. We are starting to see Uber, I'd say, flirt with uh with hotel, especially on the reserve side.
So, the experience reserve as reserving a car has demonstrated our ability to go from on-demand to plan services, so to speak. Travel is very, very natural category for us to get to. And remember this guy is from Expedia. Airports are about 15% of the gross mobility bookings and 40% of US riders take trips outside of their home city.
Ultimately, calls out that they have a relationship with Expedia. Their inventory is second to none. So, now we've got 700,000 hotels available on Uber as we speak. So, again, you're starting to see that they're starting to cut into, say, Expedia's and Airbnb's world through partnerships. And the growth in Uber One, I just want to call that out again cuz it is important.
It makes things stickier, like they spend a lot more and they're also going to get more information on you to know how to target you. So, they have 50 million members now. It accounts for over 50% of our bookings and growing 50% year-over-year. So, that's one of the secrets, I think, is getting more and more people on Uber One that are Uber users, right?
So, they added 20 million users just in a single year, which which is crazy, right? So, they just had 30 million members a year ago. And I do think there's a lot of value here for the low subscription price that it is a month. What else? I didn't see too many crazy names that I usually run into. Lately, I keep running into Bill Ackman's fund cuz technically, we own quite a lot of overweights in the same things now, which is kind of interesting, right?
We we own Brookfield around the time he did. We picked up Meta and Mike Oh, we picked up Microsoft exactly when he did. We picked up Amazon slightly ahead of when he did. So, we're seeing a lot of a lot of my core conviction bets are starting to align with Bill Ackman, which is I don't know if it's good or bad just because I haven't experienced it before, but it is interesting.
It's some kind of validation that yeah, I think this is an obvious buy. Like I do think Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Uber, Reddit, AppLovin easy buys if I zoom out 5 years from now. Anyway, here's just Gemini's attempt to try to value forward earnings and you can see right now it doesn't look like a crazy deal.
25 times the implied forward, but in terms of a growth rate, you can see it's pretty attractive of PEG ratio far under one. And then if you zoom out even farther just a year out, you can see and this is with consensus EPS. This isn't the AI coming up with anything crazy. You're getting some relatively cheap valuations relatively quickly.
So, basically either the market doesn't believe in the historical growth rate that Uber has put up or they think there's going to be a material slow down for Uber in the future. And I'm not sure if that's going to happen. Alternatively, it could be this AV fear. And that's what I am hoping people will sell it to me.
If there's a big panic, all of a sudden Tesla's going to make a new app and people can basically do Uber up just for Teslas or something. That is hard to do. It could happen. If anyone's going to do it, it would be Tesla or Google and they're the only ones who have the money to do it to burn cuz it's all like Uber was making money.
We we saw it literally was losing money 6 years ago despite already having a decent amount of sales. These things don't just happen overnight. Takes a lot of money, a lot of pain, a lot of growth, and a lot of failure. Uber, I think, last AI to visualize their the AI AV strategy for Uber. And they you can see here the overview.
18 AV partnerships. Basically, Uber's plan is to be the dispatcher. So, don't build a self-driving car on the platform that all the self-driving cars will use. Some now some people say, "Well, some car companies might not make that turn." That's true, but some will, and all these OEMs that aren't well-capitalized are likely going to just use Uber's platform for their cars and for the people as well, the the individual people.
And it will be materially cheaper for you, and they Uber can incentivize you, I think, a lot easier than uh competitors would be able to to lend your autonomous vehicle on their platform. So, I do think Uber's moat here is actually big. That doesn't mean people won't believe that, and they'll sell it to me a lot cheaper.
And I would much rather, especially after going through car companies for a long time and basically avoiding them because most of the businesses were crap, not not not any knocks on GM or Ford or anybody, but the the margins and the exposure to unions is is is something that's hard in this industry, and it is very competitive.
And I mean, as soon as you would let Chinese companies into any of these markets, they would take share immediately because they're better products at cheaper prices. And it's not even close at 2026. I would much rather own the dispatcher of the AVs than the AV makers themselves, especially in a world that's going to be fragmented.
There's not going to be a world where 70% of the population drives a Tesla. It just won't happen. 50% of the world probably hates Elon just by principles, won't buy the brand. The other 50% probably love them. Maybe they would. I don't know. If it's the product's right and his values right, anything could happen.
But usually, and historically, it's been a very fragmented, right? There's a lot of car companies out there, and they all offer, in my mind, relatively similar items. We are seeing a lot of these partnerships. So, if especially if so you have Waymo in 23, Waymo again, service area. You have Lucid and Nuro.
You have AV Ride in Dallas and Baidu in China. Uh, you have the Europe debut with Wave in London. Again, Lucid. So, you are seeing uh these AVs start coming online, and I do think they'll be dispatched through the Uber platform. And I do think Uber is only going to increase their network effect by having more drivers on the road, whether they are human or autonomous, it's only going to make things easier.
If anything, it'll be easier to make your autonomous EV make money on the harder hours that historically haven't been more populated. So, basically, I think the network effect is going to go into overdrive. Basically, what I mean there is the AI will be able to say, you can make the most money with your car during this time and this time at this area.
And Uber knows that and it'll tell the driver, "Hey, if you want to make more money, go here at this time." And instead of you having to wake up and say a time that doesn't work for you, with autonomous vehicle, you could just go while you're sleeping, right? That's the world that's going to happen.
And I do think Uber is the best situated for that world, at least given all current information. Let's quickly go over the financials. Video's already longer than I wanted. Here you can see just the revenue growth going from 11 billion to 17 to 37 to 52. Uh Claude, basically, I in my mind is very conservative.
It basically thinks revenue growth rate's going to slow. So, what has it putting up 18% CAGR? It thinks it's going to slow to 14 and then 13. Analysts have higher numbers than these. This is just Claude. I think Claude bias is conservative. I don't know, but I think it it definitely on growthier names, it seems to really be biased towards some type of mean reversion that's never happened before.
If that makes sense. It's basically the law of large numbers will apply this year and then it'll apply this year, even though it for Uber it hasn't happened for the last 5 years. 20% 20% 20% like clockwork, right? Anyway, uh you have seen COGS that AI thinks COGS is going to be 60% of revenue because it has historically, even though we just saw it went down to 55% because of the UK thing.
So, I think AI mis-modeled this. Um but that's because of something more recent, so I can let that slide. SGA, you have seen scale over time. Just imagine going from Here you can see they they weren't even covering their SGA even in 2021 when we were starting to get recovery. Still not covering their SGA.
Now, let's look at it. You make 20 billion in gross profit, your SG is only 11. That that's scale. That's what I mean in this business. You're just seeing material scale across the SG and G&A lines. R&D has also shown scale, but it's been more lumpier. Just going from 11 billion to 52 billion, your R&D only went from 2.2 to 3.4, right?
So, you made 40 billion more dollars and you had spent 1.2 billion more in R&D. You're just just material scale across all line items and you're seeing that drop down in the numbers finally. In terms of EPS, the AI did something good here and basically it realized the provisions for taxable benefits.
So, basically Uber had a series of losses for its entire history and it finally started turning profitability and then they expect basically under GAAP because you have these tax these losses that you've taken. So, basically Uber got a lot of that back and you can see that here and it shot up the EPS.
AI recognized that and so I go now you're going to start paying tax again, so it shot the EPS back down and I would say it's a lot more conservative than what Gemini thinks, but even on the conservative numbers, you are getting something with a P that's going from to 20 a year out from now to 14.8 two years from now.
And that's with a assumed slowing growth rate, assumed a worse COGS. So, I think there's there's is definitely an interesting time to look at Uber and analysts I believe aren't expecting much and Claude definitely isn't. But anyway, I'd like to know your thoughts on Uber. I do think it's situated to win in the AV world and hopefully if there's news of like some type of company trying to fight and take Uber on as being the dispatcher for autonomous vehicles and it gives an opportunity to buy, I'm going to be all over this company.
If someone can sell it to me in the 50s, right? I mean, last time we were able to pick it up in the 30s. That would be the dream. Obviously, the business is far better than it was in '22, right? You're already at 60 billion dollars instead of 30 billion dollars in revenue, but it's just anyway, very interesting time to look at the business and I'd like to know your thoughts and have a great rest of your day.
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