The company’s headquarters in San Francisco. Uber has been under investor pressure to show it has a path to future profits.
Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News
Uber Technologies Inc.’s UBER -4.01% chief financial officer said the company expects to be cash-flow positive by the end of this year, as he outlined new bookings and earnings targets for investors Thursday.
If Uber meets that goal, it would mark the first time that the underlying business of the ride-hailing and food-delivery company generates more cash than it spends. Investors say a company with a lot of cash can better survive shocks and unexpected economic downturns, even if business slows and revenue and earnings suffer as they did during the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
It isn’t uncommon for Silicon Valley startups to bleed red ink. Uber—which was founded in 2009 and went public in 2019—has been under increasing pressure from investors to show it has a path to sustainable, future profits.
Uber CFO Nelson Chai said the company expects to generate meaningful cash flow in the near-term, without specifying how much.
Mr. Chai also said the company aims to nearly double its gross bookings—the total value of bookings on its platform—in the next three years. San Francisco-based Uber expects gross bookings of as much as $175 billion by 2024, compared with $90 billion in 2021.
Uber has trimmed its losses during the health crisis, cutting staff and shedding noncore operations such as its self-driving unit. The company has “turned the crisis into an opportunity,” Mr. Chai said during Uber’s Investor Day conference in New York City on Thursday.
The company posted its first quarterly adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization last year. Investors look at this metric to gauge the strength of a company’s underlying operations. Mr. Chai said Uber expects adjusted Ebitda of roughly $5 billion in 2024. The company posted a loss of $774 million by that measure in 2021.
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