Uber Technologies Inc. shares ticked higher in late trading Thursday, after the ride-hailing company lived up to its expectations in the first earnings report since a gargantuan initial public offering.
Uber UBER, -0.35% reported first-quarter losses of $1.01 billion, or $2.26 a share, on revenue of $3.1 billion. Shares gained a bit more than 1% in after-hours trading immediately following the report. The stock has yet to touch its IPO price of $45 a share in regular trading since the first trading day on May 10.
Uber disclosed ahead of the IPO that it expected to lose at least $1 billion and up to $1.11 billion in the first quarter, on net revenue of $3.04 billion to $3.1 billion. In the year-ago quarter, Uber reported massive earnings of $3.75 billion on revenue of $2.58 billion, though that outsize profit was linked to the sale of some of its international operations, with a stated operational loss of about half a billion dollars in the year-ago quarter.
“Our Q1 2019 results were at or near the high end of the ranges we shared last month in our IPO prospectus,” Chief Financial Officer Nelson Chai said in a statement. “Our investments remain focused on global platform expansion and long-term product and technology differentiation, but we will not hesitate to invest to defend our market position globally.”
Not enough analysts projected Uber’s first-quarter earnings to form a solid consensus for this report. Analysts for banks that underwrite an initial public offering tend to wait 25 days from the offering before initiating coverage of a stock, and most of Wall Street helped out on Uber’s IPO, which listed an astounding 29 banks as underwriters. Expect a wave of Uber initiations next week with analysts’ thoughts on this earnings report.
Uber reported bookings — which represents the total amount of money spent on the Uber platform, instead of just the part that Uber takes and is counted as revenue — of $14.65 billion, with 78.1% coming from the core ride-hailing business. Uber said in its pre-IPO disclosure that it expected gross bookings of $14.44 billion to $14.66 billion, with about 78% of that total attributed to its ride-sharing platform and most of the rest coming from the Uber Eats food-delivery business.
Rival Lyft Inc. LYFT, -2.54% stopped disclosing bookings information in its first earnings report after its earlier IPO, despite providing the information in pre-IPO filings. Chief Financial Officer Brian Roberts said at the time that Lyft “really wanted to try to avoid investor confusion” in not providing the information.
More: Lyft stops providing key data after IPO, then insults investors’ intelligence
Uber stock closed Thursday with a 0.5% loss at $39.76, then topped $40 in immediate after-hours trading following the release of the report.
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