Key Points
- Uber’s gross bookings rose 25 per cent year over year in the first quarter.
- Uber reported that its autonomous car journeys increased more than tenfold year-on-year.
- Uber hopes to start piloting driverless cars in as many as 15 locations by the end of the year.
Is It Time to Buy Uber Stock?
Shares of Uber Technologies (UBER 1.67%) climbed almost 8% on Wednesday after the ride-hailing company reported first-quarter earnings.
The stock has been on a terrible run in 2026, trading significantly below its October 2025 peak. But the current earnings report rekindled the bull argument, showing rapid gross bookings growth in mobile and a 44% surge in non-GAAP (adjusted) profits per share.
Even better, the second-quarter projection suggests a constant-currency gross bookings increase of 18% to 22% year over year. That’s a good clip for a corporation already working at a massive size.
With shares off their highs and the underlying firm seemingly doing no wrong, is it time to buy?
Impressive business momentum
Uber’s revenue climbed 14% year-over-year to more than $13 billion in the first quarter. But its underlying business momentum is really better than that, with an accounting tweak to certain business models knocking approximately 9 percentage points off reported sales growth.
A better measure of demand, gross bookings reached $53.7 billion, up 25% (21% constant currency). This marks the third straight quarter of over 21% constant-currency growth for a firm that booked $193.5 billion in 2025. Growth came from multiple areas: mobility advanced, delivery climbed 23%, and goods returned to growth after two years.
Also, Uber’s profitability is growing faster than its top line. Adjusted operating income increased 42% year over year to $1.9 billion, and adjusted profits per share grew 44%. The $2.3 billion in free cash flow in a single quarter demonstrates how cash-generative the platform has become.
Uber’s membership programme is also factoring more into the tale. Uber hit the 50 million mark. Starting in April, members now represent half of mobility and delivery gross bookings.
There could also be an important tailwind that is yet to completely develop. The cost of insurance for U.S. mobility is finally coming down, and Uber is passing those savings on to customers. This will be the first post-COVID year when we have excellent leverage on our insurance cost line for the U.S. mobility company,’ said chief financial officer Balaji Krishnamurthy on Uber’s first-quarter earnings call.
A capital-light autonomy strategy
Of course, the broader long-term discussion is still about driverless cars. And here, the first-quarter report offered some hope alongside a warning of what may go wrong.
Trips on the platform using autonomous mobility surged more than tenfold year over year. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi indicated that he anticipates Uber would be operational with autonomous cars in as many as 15 locations by year-end, with around half of them being international.
The plan is a capital-light one. Instead of building its own self-driving stack, the company is integrating partners like Alphabet’s Waymo, Amazon’s Zoox, Wayve, Waabi, Pony, WeRide, and Baidu into its app, while selling things like custom insurance and fleet operations to those partners through a new Uber Autonomous Solutions offering.
The main company has not been clearly hurt by autonomous ride-sharing competition, at least for now. And then if you look at the type of areas where Waymo has been launching […] our category position in San Francisco and L.A. is greater now than it was 6 months ago,” Khosrowshahi said on the first-quarter earnings call. He also rejected a winner-take-all framework, saying autonomous transportation is “another $1 trillion [total addressable market]”.
But even so, the autonomous picture isn’t all bright.
Earlier this year, Tesla said it aims to aggressively ramp its own Robotaxi service to seven more U.S. cities in the first half of 2026, including Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, and Las Vegas. In contrast, Tesla owns the car and the software for its Robotaxi effort and is constructing the network in-house as well.
“That vertical integration could put pressure on the economics of Uber over time if Tesla’s service scales quickly. Uber’s almost complete reliance on third parties for autonomous hardware and software cuts both ways. also keeps capital outlays cheap, but also binds Uber’s autonomous future to the timeframes, safety records, and commercial willingness of its partners. <
Uber stock is attractively valued, with a forward price-to-earnings ratio of roughly 22 for a firm that is increasing gross bookings by more than 20% and generating almost $10 billion in yearly free cash flow. And after around a 25% decline from the top last year, the risk-reward seems better than it has in a while.
But this is also a high-risk stock. The transition from human-driven to self-driving ride-hailing is far from over, and Uber’s capital-light strategy might turn out to be clever or brittle, depending on how partners and rivals grow. Investors purchasing now are accepting real uncertainty on how the next several years will play out.
This Tech Could Be Worth 18 Nvidias
The CEO of Nvidia has said there’s one discovery that might produce more billionaires in the next 5 years than the internet did in 20 years.
The effect is ‘impossible to overestimate’, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos says. Cathie Wood sees a potential of $80 trillion for AI by 2030. That’s comparable to 18 Nvidias, 21 Microsofts, or 33 Amazons.
But what most investors overlook is that practically all that growth goes via a single choke point. One little-known business, an “Indispensable Monopoly”, supplies the crucial technology that Nvidia, AMD, and Intel cannot operate without. And it’s still a fraction of Nvidia’s size. We recently published a whole new report with the firm name and the entire narrative.