저자: MKFinance진행자 · 외국인
요약 보기
Uber는 모빌리티·배달·화물 3개 마켓플레이스를 운영하는 소프트웨어 중개 플랫폼으로, 네트워크 효과와 높은 현금흐름이 강점. 빌 애크먼은 Q1 2025 첫 포지션으로 편입 후 Q2 2026 비중을 14% 늘림. 잉여현금흐름은 2022년 이후 안정적으로 증가하며 현재 PFCF 15배 수준으로 역사적 저점. 자율주행 우려는 과도하다고 봄. 진행자 자체 적정가 약 63달러, 본인은 아직 매수하지 않았다고 명시.
다듬은 글
Hello everyone and welcome to the MK Finance channel. Today, we're going to take a look at Billakman's portfolio . We're just going to look at why he made Uber his first position and we're going to try to understand his underlying thesis regarding Uber. To begin, uh, we're just going to start by going back a little bit to Uber.
I know it's a very well-known company. Most people have used Uber at least once in their lives, either for transportation or for deliveries. Essentially, this is a technological platform that orchestrates three marketplaces. I think the first two are very well known. Specifically, mobility, that's for getting around, and delivery, that's really for getting food delivered and so on .
But freight, I think that's the least known and that's why I still made a small definition. What does it take to understand? So FR is the logistics and freight transport branch of Uber, which connects shippers and companies that want to transport goods with carriers, companies or truck drivers who have the transport capacity.
Basically, Uber realized that many trucks, when they make deliveries and then return to the company on the way back, are returning empty. who thought, why not try to make this profitable and try to do some freight transport for another company. Basically, that's it , it's just integrated within the application and so, for example, if a driver has already made his delivery and plans to return empty, meaning he has nothing left in his truck, he can decide to take a ride like that and it makes money for the company and also, of course, for Uber here.
So what exactly is Uber? The thing is, Uber is going to connect millions of users to independent service providers without owning a car, a restaurant, or a truck. We all understand that. Therefore, its positioning is strategic. Auer defines itself as a software intermediary, not as an employer, which allows it to maintain a lean structure with outsourced variable costs.
So the drivers, the transport delivery people, it's really going to be costs that will be borne by the drivers, the delivery people and the carriers and internalized fixed costs, namely technology, data and operations. So the result of all this is a highly scalable model with returns and really very high margins.
So Uber's competitive advantage , what I've taken away from this here, is really its network density, it's really its network effect. The more drivers and customers there are, the shorter the waiting times , the smoother the experience, and the higher the retention rate. Obviously, it's a predictable cash cow .
The growth of F cashfow is visible and disciplined. Obviously, she was visible on both for the last three or four years. Previously, it focused much more on customer acquisition and so on, but now it's really been about profitability for the last few years. So in the long term, Uber is preparing for the next step: automation with autonomous vehicles.
It collaborates in particular with Wimo and Zox, an Amazon company. the integration of the Uber Black premium service. Uber Black is really about premium luxury cars that will take you from point A to point B. It is obviously much more expensive for a ride. Uber for business is for companies that will transport their customers or employees from point A to point B.
And over, that's really interesting. This is, for example, hospitals or clinics that, for example, have an appointment with a doctor in a clinic, and so on . So his residence will be able to use Uber Earth which will be much more suitable than just a taxi driver who will be brought from this clinic to his home or from his home to the clinic.
And finally, the consolidation of delivery as a driving force that will be sustainable. Now, what interests us here? We've really seen a bit of a recovery of what is Uber? Okay, it's well known, but it's still good to go back a little bit to find out what it is. But what really interests us is Billakman's thesis of understanding why he made it his first position.
This thesis, uh, is easy to find in the background. It's in what they publish, since it's now listed on the stock exchange . So he publishes everything he does, why he bought the company and everything. So here we have Q1 2025. So here he has demonstrated his thesis. For what ? I'm just summarizing here.
So when he took a position in Q1 2025, Black emphasized three pillars. So the first one is the massive scale, so it's the network effect. So, 8 million drivers, 170 million active users, global presence, an ultra-dense, multifaceted network. Subsequently, there is also data leadership. Uh, Uber will possess the best mobility data in the world, with algorithmic engine, matching and pring, as well as real-time optimized routing in marketplaces.
The third point is the powerful network effect . That's what I, uh, remembered from it. More drivers equals lower prices, more drivers, shorter waiting times, more customers, more revenue for drivers, more drivers, better availability. So it's a self-reinforcing virtuous circle that the competitor cannot easily replicate.
Before, unless you possessed that much data. It still took a huge amount of years and cash, which she lost at the beginning. She still has a lot of money to be able to finance all of this and acquire such a massive scale as Uber now has . And subsequently, he also mentions explosive growth which is also sustainable.
So he's going to remind us that booking is really orders that have been growing by 20% per year since 2019. Booking mobility +24%, booking delivery +18%, geographic expansion, new products, gas frequency on the rise. Uber is a high-growth business despite its gigantic size; basically, growth is there every quarter.
Why is it a winner in this model? According to Blackman, autonomous vehicles cannot manage the massive variability of demand. Therefore, demand varies by a factor of 10 depending on the time and day. A 100% autonomous vehicle network will be underutilized most of the time, overloaded during peak hours, and unable to maintain a low price with lower latency.
So the optimal solution is a hybrid network of autonomous cars plus human drivers because Uber already owns it and Uber is the only player capable of providing this hybrid network. So what is Bilakman telling us here ? that for him because there is still a lot of fear surrounding autonomous vehicles that we hear about on the market.
In fact, that's why the stock price of boos has still fallen since uh but what he thinks is that since Uber already owns the largest human driver network in the world. It's really well optimized and I think the integration of the autonomous vehicle will just make a big difference, which will be hybrid by using both options.
Why did he strengthen his position in Q2 2026? We can see that he increased his position by 14% so that it became 12.7% of his total portfolio. So his explanation is that the market punished Uber because of exaggerated fears about autonomous vehicles. Yes, there has been tension with Wimo but Uber is moving quickly with other partners and preparing the launches of autonomous vehicles in several cities, including a partner with Amazon as well.
Meanwhile, the business is booming with +35% profit growth, yet the stock is trading at 19 times earnings. One of the lowest valuations in its history for Bilakman is a total disconnect between market perception and economic reality. So we can really see BM still has a great conviction in Uber and he thinks that the current price is really disconnected from the economic reality of this company.
And now, what do I think about my thesis on this company? So Uber today is a cash machine. We're not going to hide it, especially we're going to look here, particularly since 2022 when I said it really started to become more profitable. We can see that the blue area here represents the total income.
You can see that there is a growth of 17% per year in, uh, orange. Here it will be the free cash flow which has a really incredible growth of 192% per year, obviously. This is not sustainable growth, but we see that for example if we talk about 70% since 2023, 41% since the last year. Obviously, we can't sustain very high growth rates like that, but we can still see that growth is there every time.
And the line here is going to be the free cash flow. uh, per share there is a slight uh difference uh because it is the share buybacks or dilutions that make uh change. As you will have understood, for this company, we obviously need to focus much more on free cash flow than on reset or EPS, uh, earnings per cent, basically.
This is still very polluted by intangible elements for example or depreciation, it is more interesting to take flich flow especially since there is not really a lot of capex for this company and it is stable at that level. So uh that's what I have uh because because before that if we look back the FA was negative.
Since then, looking at it since 2017, we see that the FACH is negative, but since 2022 it had become stable at the FA show level and we see that it continues to increase. So, as I was saying, it has become a machine for hiding years of conquest; the model has become stable, profitable, and predictable.
Their global network, they are truly the word density, reliability uh availability, an efficiency that no one can match uh because there are still competitors, but there really is no uh competitor, it is also huge uh also like a big network effect than uh uh Uber. So three engines are driving growth: mobility, delivery, and premium segments like Uber Black, which we saw gaining significant traction.
Uh, the company is entering the maturity phase, the accounting is being established, the risks are known because there are still regulatory risks that we hear much, much less about now with governments, but in the past, there have been many problems at that level with regulation, but that is still a risk to be aware of.
We also need to add the risk of autonomous vehicles, and as we saw with Bacin, it wasn't really a risk. This could have been really beneficial for Uber. But you should know that, for example, if Tesla puts Cyber, well, basically it's going to be very difficult to have the same network as Uber because basically it's not just the cars, it's really the network effect.
There are more drivers, more customers using it. So it brings more drivers since there are still a lot of offers, a lot of demand and if there are a lot of offers well people will take them because there is less waiting. So Tesla really needs to try to match that if it wants to gain market share. But I really think I agree with Bacman here it's going to be really complicated and I think it's going to be much more of a company that will become hybrid at this level than something that will be distributed by, for example, autonomous vehicles.
So as I was saying, the risks are known and cash flow becomes the heart of the Eber model. This is the transition from a growth start-up to a global sustainable cash generation platform. And uh now, I think it's still interesting to go and look at uh when uh he bought uh this company. as we saw, it was Q1 2025, so around January 2025 until March, so around 60-70, I think it stayed at 60 or even lower here.
lower down maybe he bought uh at 60 and he recently reinforced Q2 2025, which means that it is uh from March, April 1st here until uh June, end of June, so it would also be around uh 60 dollars, 65 68 dollars. And I think that every time it reaches that price, it gets stronger. And I still had fun making a fair purchase price.
Here, I made normal beer, normal neutral beer, and neutral beer. Here, I've put in growth that will uh stabilize. I didn't use growth rates that high. In terms of free cash flow per share, I put the lowest value at 11%. For neutral, here it's 12%. For the boule, really 13%. And uh, for the price to free cash flow, we can either go and look at what it had the time of in the past.
So the price to free cash flow, if we put it here and then raise the others to make it more uh clean. So we're going to put it in from 2022 onwards since it was more profitable at that time. So we can see that currently it is at its lowest, it is at 15 of uh price to free cash flow. So I put it for my neutral scenario and the bull scenario, I put 17 13.
I think it had never reached such a low level and it gave me a price of $63 for the neutral scenario . So that's roughly the price Bilakman paid to acquire this company. I don't know what valuation model he uses, but if we go by here, we put in a growth of 12% to be quite conservative and even at the price to free cash flow level, that would give us a fair purchase price of $63 to have a return of 15% for the next 5 years.
So, we ended up at the same price that Bacakman got when he bought this company. But obviously this is not investment advice. If I were to buy this company, I would buy it at that price. But I'm not there yet because I still have, uh, plenty of other businesses in mind. But honestly, if I were to buy it, it would be at that price.
And, uh, it's still a very convincing thesis from Bacakman, especially since he made it his first position. So that's all for today. Uh, if you liked it, just give it a like, and if you're already subscribed, I invite you to subscribe, and we'll see you for the next video. Bye!
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