Uber reported second-quarter results before Wednesday’s open. Gross bookings came in at $58.02 billion, up 24% year over year and 22% in constant currency, clearing the roughly $57.2 billion analysts expected. Trips grew 18% to 3.87 billion. Non-GAAP earnings were $0.81 a share, up 35%, in line with consensus. Trailing-twelve-month free cash flow crossed $10 billion for the first time in the company’s history. Shares fell about 4%.
What they fell on was revenue: $14.19 billion, up 12%, against about $14.24 billion modeled. A $50 million miss on a $14 billion line. To understand why that number is doing something strange, go to the segment table.
Mobility — ride-hailing, Uber’s largest and most profitable business — booked $28.99 billion, up 22%. Mobility revenue was $7.36 billion, up 1%. Flat, in constant currency. Delivery, by contrast, grew bookings 26% and revenue 28%. The entire divergence between Uber’s headline growth and its headline revenue sits in one segment.
Our take: Revenue has stopped being a usable growth metric for Uber, and the company said so in the release: business model changes cut reported revenue growth by eight percentage points. Uber quantified that only at the company level, so you can’t formally pin all eight on Mobility — but Mobility is where the hole is. Meanwhile Mobility’s segment operating income grew 28% to $2.22 billion on revenue that grew 1%. You cannot get that from a business in trouble; you get it from a business that reclassified how it books the same rides. Anyone who sold a $50 million revenue miss today sold a number Uber is deliberately shrinking. The soft spot is real, but it’s one line lower.
The number that isn’t distorted is the one that guided light
Bookings carry no accounting asterisk, which makes the Q3 outlook the actual news. Uber guided to $58.25–60.25 billion — a $59.25 billion midpoint against the $59.33 billion Wall Street had. Non-GAAP EPS of $0.84–0.88 puts the midpoint at $0.86 versus a $0.89 consensus. Both light. Not alarming, but on a stock that has run on a growth-plus-margin story, a guide that misses on the clean metric matters more than a miss on the dirty one.
The GAAP line deserves its own warning label. Net income of $2.39 billion and diluted EPS of $1.17 — up 85% — include a $1.6 billion pre-tax gain from revaluing Uber’s equity investments. Strip that out and non-GAAP net income was $1.65 billion. The $1.17 is not a run rate.
What to watch
- Whether the eight points repeat. If business model changes keep suppressing reported revenue into Q3 and Q4, the street has to re-anchor on bookings and take-rate disclosure instead. Companies rarely enjoy that transition.
- Central costs. Corporate G&A and platform R&D rose 18% to $1.10 billion — faster than revenue. Segment profit covered it this quarter. That is the test each quarter from here.
- Freight. Bookings up 25% to $1.57 billion, operating loss $24 million against $26 million a year ago. Scale arrived; profit did not.
- The cash. Free cash flow of $2.79 billion in the quarter, past $10 billion on a trailing basis — but only $518 million of stock repurchased in Q2 against $3.53 billion across the first half. The CFO flagged “strategic opportunities.” Uber has been in advanced talks on Delivery Hero. Those two facts belong in the same sentence.
Uber added more first-time users in the past twelve months than in any period in five years, and 208 million people used the platform monthly, up 16%. The demand story is intact. The reporting story is the one that changed — and for the next few quarters, reading this company will mean ignoring its top line.