Audience Acceleration, U.S. Pricing Reflation, and an AV Roadmap That Keeps Getting More Concrete — Maintaining Outperform.

Rating Action

We initiated coverage of Uber at Hold at Q1 2025 on the view that the operating story was high-quality but the asymmetry was already partially priced: gross bookings compounding in the high-teens, mobility category leadership unchallenged, delivery profitability inflecting, but with three open questions — (1) whether U.S. mobility could re-accelerate against persistent insurance-cost pressure that was being passed through to consumers, (2) whether the AV transition would be net-positive or net-negative to Uber's long-term economics, and (3) whether the capital-return framework would scale with FCF generation. We maintained Hold at Q2 2025 as audience growth accelerated but insurance pricing pass-through still capped U.S. trip elasticity, and the AV partner roster, while broadening, had not yet reached the deployment-readiness signal we wanted to see. We maintained Hold at Q3 2025 when management laid out the six-area strategic framework and the ~50% FCF capital-return commitment — constructive, but the print itself had not yet shown the U.S. inflection clearly enough, and the buyback cadence had not yet stepped up to a level that would meaningfully reduce share count.

The Q4 2025 print and the FY2026 framework reset clear the bar on each open question simultaneously. U.S. acceleration: management is now guiding to accelerating U.S. trips and gross bookings in 2026 — an unusual posture for a platform at this scale — with insurance flipping from a deleveraging cost line to a leverage line as product-driven savings ("hundreds of millions of dollars" per Krishnamurthy) and reform compound. Holding consumer prices flat or better is the demand-elasticity unlock. AV concretization: the 15-city target by year-end 2026, the 25,000-vehicle Waabi exclusivity, the NVIDIA real-world-data partnership, and the disclosed 30% utilization advantage on Uber's 3P network versus standalone 1P deployments collectively shift the AV story from "credible optionality" to "deployable strategy." Capital return cadence: the ~50% FCF framework on a $9.8B base growing 42% sizes the buyback envelope at $4.5B+ annually with growth, against a market cap where management explicitly calls the stock "cheap." That combination is unusual at this scale.

We initiated coverage at Hold at Q1 2025 (May 8, 2025), upgraded to Outperform at Q2 2025 (August 7, 2025) on symmetric +18% trips/GBs growth and the $20B buyback authorization, and maintained Outperform at Q3 2025 (November 5, 2025) as trip growth accelerated to 21% and the Nvidia/Stellantis announcement crystallized the multi-partner AV thesis. Today we are maintaining Outperform on the FY26 framework reset. The asymmetry has continued to shift in our favor: the same business now has a faster top line (gross bookings +22% in Q4), a structurally improving margin line (insurance reflation flipping from deleveraging line to leverage line on hundreds of millions of product-driven savings), a more concrete AV roadmap (15-city deployment by year-end 2026 with disclosed 30% utilization advantage on Uber's 3P network), and a more aggressive capital-return cadence (~50% FCF return on a $9.8B base growing 42%) than we had to underwrite at the Q2 upgrade. Downgrade catalysts: U.S. mobility re-deceleration if insurance reform stalls or AV competitive dynamics in San Francisco/Austin/Atlanta hit Uber's take-rate; capital-return discipline slipping (e.g., a transformative-scale acquisition that diverts the buyback); CFO transition execution risk if Balaji's framework drifts from what was presented on the Q4 call. Reinforce-Outperform catalysts: a clean H1 2026 print confirming U.S. acceleration, a first material AV revenue contribution (likely H2 2026), or a step-up in buyback cadence.

Results vs. Consensus

The Q4 print is best read as the closing act of the FY25 framework rather than a beat/miss event — management led with annualized run-rate metrics and full-year totals rather than headline P&L lines, and the FY26 framework took up the bulk of prepared remarks and Q&A. The headline metrics that management explicitly disclosed and consensus tracks:

Quality of the Print

• Gross bookings: +22% YoY in Q4 against an exceptionally hard prior-year comp is the single strongest growth read in our coverage period. The fifth consecutive year above 20% — on a base that is now multiples of where the company was when this streak began — is the durability signal that justifies a different valuation framework than the in-line-with-S&P assumption that anchored our Hold.
• Audience acceleration through the year: MAPC entered 2025 at +14% and exited at +18%. Inflection within a year on a 200M-user base is rare; it points to (a) early-life-cycle CAC investment paying off, (b) new-product cohorts (Moto, Reserve, Wait & Save, Women Preferred, Teens) widening the funnel rather than cannibalizing existing demand, (c) the membership program supercharging cohort retention.
• Free cash flow: $9.8B (+42%) on $8.7B EBITDA is a 113% conversion ratio. Working-capital and timing always need disclosure for any single year, but the multi-year FCF compounding has now reached the level where capital allocation, not free-cash-flow generation, is the constraint.
• Membership penetration: 46M Uber One members growing 55% YoY, approaching 50% of GB, is the single highest-leverage retention disclosure. Members are quantifiably stickier — once a consumer is in the program, they cross-purchase across rides, eats, grocery, and (eventually) AV with much higher frequency than non-members. Crossing 50% would be a structural inflection in the LTV math.

Segment Performance

Management did not break out segment-level OI on the call (this typically lives in the supplemental slides released alongside), but the qualitative framing across Mobility, Delivery, and Freight was unusually specific. We read each in turn.

Mobility — The Heart of the Q4 Print

Mobility is where the framework reset is most consequential. The U.S. story has three layers stacking simultaneously into 2026: insurance reform driving structural cost relief; a barbell product strategy (low end + high end both growing 40%) widening the addressable rider base; sparse-market expansion (1.5x–2x faster than dense markets) opening U.S. geography that was historically under-served by Uber's product line. Krishnamurthy framed insurance as the operative variable on U.S. unit economics:

"We have held prices relatively consistent. And as we look forward with the amount of insurance reform and product-driven hundreds of millions of dollars of cost savings that we are seeing, we are in a position where insurance is going from a deleveraging cost item to something that gives us leverage, and that allows us to hold prices flat or better in certain markets. So that price consistency has a huge impact on long-term elasticity of demand." — Balaji Krishnamurthy, incoming CFO

The geographic breakdown is the part the bull case has been underwriting and that the Street has historically under-modeled. Khosrowshahi disclosed that 70% of the U.S. is outside the top markets, that 75% of U.S. profits come from those non-top markets, and that 60% of mobility gross bookings are international:

"70% of the U.S. is outside of the top markets and nearly 75% of our U.S. profits come from those markets. And that — those numbers have been growing because those markets are growing faster than the top 20 cities." — Balaji Krishnamurthy, incoming CFO

"Just remind investors that 60% of our mobility gross bookings are international outside of the U.S. as well. So we have a big business in the U.S. outside of the big cities, and we have an even bigger business outside of the U.S. as it relates to mobility." — Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO

Assessment: The "Uber profit pool is concentrated in the top 20 cities" critique — a recurring AV-bear argument — is empirically incorrect by a wide margin per management's disclosure. The combination of insurance reflation + sparse-market expansion + barbell products is the cleanest setup for U.S. acceleration we've seen in coverage.

Delivery — Five-Vector Growth Story

Delivery growth accelerated to multi-year highs in the quarter. Khosrowshahi enumerated five drivers, each compounding on a different time-horizon:

1. Selection. 30%–40% of TAM in many markets — meaningful unaddressed selection runway, particularly in U.S. SMBs and less-dense areas. Sales-force investment is being amplified by AI.
2. Sparse-market expansion. Suburban U.S. category position is structurally below dense-city position; closing that gap is a multi-year effort.
3. Grocery and retail. "$1 trillion opportunity" framing; 5 of top 10 U.S. grocers on platform; multi-year exclusive with Coles, Australia's largest grocer.
4. Membership. 46M members growing 55%, approaching 50% of total platform GB.
5. International new launches. Eats has structurally lagged Mobility internationally; #3 in U.K. now #1, organic launch in Germany now neck-and-neck, Japan #1.

Assessment: The five vectors are independent enough that delivery growth is unlikely to decelerate sharply in any single quarter on a single-driver shock; the diversification of the growth story is itself a margin-improvement vehicle, since each new selection cohort and each new market launch compounds the marketplace density that drives unit economics.

Freight — Strategic Role in AV Utilization

Freight is not a headline P&L driver in this print but plays an increasingly important strategic role in the AV thesis. Khosrowshahi explicitly framed freight, last-mile delivery, and mobility as a single utilization platform: in mobility's trough demand hours (Saturday-to-Monday demand drops ~45% on the rideshare network), AVs deployed across the full Uber logistics stack hit structurally higher daily utilization than 1P AV networks that only do mobility.

Assessment: Freight's role in the FY26–27 narrative is less about its own segment OI and more about the structural utilization advantage it gives Uber's AV platform. That is a real moat that no single-product AV player can replicate.

Advertising — Ceiling Already Exceeded

Krishnamurthy disclosed that the prior 2% delivery-ads penetration ceiling has been surpassed. SMB ad penetration is "a lot higher than 2%" while enterprise ad growth is now outpacing SMB — meaning the long-tail of enterprise ad maturity (typically the larger and more durable spend tier) is now the leading edge. Grocery, retail, and mobility ad surfaces remain "nascent."

Assessment: Advertising is now structurally above the original framework. It remains a high-incremental-margin lever and a growing share of segment OI as it scales.

Key Topics & Management Commentary

Overall management tone: Confident, specific, and forward-looking. Khosrowshahi spent meaningful prepared-remarks time on AV economics, partner architecture, and 3P-vs-1P utilization data — the most quantitative the company has been on AV in any prior call we've reviewed. Mahendra-Rajah and Krishnamurthy presented the FY26 framework with no daylight on the operating thesis. The CFO transition was handled with unusual grace; the new CFO presented the framework alongside the outgoing CFO and did not appear to be in a learning posture.

The Autonomous Roadmap — From "Optionality" to "Strategy"

The single largest strategic update in the call. Khosrowshahi framed the AV opportunity as a multi-trillion-dollar TAM and Uber's platform as the structurally advantaged 3P aggregator. Three datapoints made the story more concrete than at any prior point in our coverage:

• 15-city deployment target by end of 2026, with depot real estate, charging infrastructure, and government-relations work in flight in parallel.
• Utilization advantage: AVs on Uber's platform run ~30% higher trips-per-vehicle-per-day with better ETAs than 1P standalone networks per publicly available data.
• Partner roster: Waymo, NVIDIA (joint real-world data factory at 3M+ hours), Waabi (first 25,000 passenger vehicles exclusive to Uber), Avride, Nuro, Lucid (production-ready), plus international (Pony, WeRide, Baidu).

Khosrowshahi addressed the winner-take-most concern directly:

"As it relates to AV and winner-take-most, listen, I think this is true of technology platforms, and I would remind you that as it relates to Mobility and now increasingly Delivery, Uber is the winner who has taken most… I think hardware is fundamentally different in that if you look at the OEM industry, there are many, many car manufacturers, manufacturing is local, you have local champions." — Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO

And the unit economics framing on partner deals:

"In the deals that we're striking today with various partners, with AV partners at scale, we are going to have healthy economics based on current consumer fares and healthy economics mean positive economics. And these are deals that we're striking right now." — Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO

On capital intensity, Khosrowshahi acknowledged Uber will put balance-sheet capital to work to guarantee supply, but described a financialization vector — private equity, banks, fleet operators — that mirrors how data centers and hotel real estate are owned by REITs rather than operators:

"While we will make commitments, and these commitments are for profitable economics, we do think that we will have a very, very healthy financing ecosystem, both in terms of equity and debt. Just like Marriott doesn't have to own its hotels, you've got REITs that own their hotels and kind of making an appropriate return on equity, you will see the same thing in the future on fleets." — Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO

And on supply-side dynamics, the ramp is constrained by OEM capacity, not by Uber's ability to deploy:

"This is going to be a game of avoiding bottlenecks down the road. So in parallel, we need OEMs to start ramping capacity. And as you've seen us talk about tens of thousands of vehicles already announced in a few partnerships, we will have a lot more of those kind of OEM relationships coming down the pike." — Balaji Krishnamurthy, incoming CFO

Assessment: The AV story is now a deployable strategy with named partners, a 15-city deployment plan, and disclosed utilization advantages. The capital-intensity question — the principal bear concern at our Q3 maintenance — has a coherent answer: equity commitments where they unlock supply, financialized fleet ownership where it scales.

Capital Return — ~50% FCF, "Aggressive" Buyback at "Cheap" Stock

Krishnamurthy reaffirmed the ~50% FCF capital-return philosophy and indicated buybacks would continue at "a steady cadence" with "a healthy amount" of share count reduction. The framing of the stock as "really cheap" by the CFO is the most direct valuation statement we've heard from management:

"Based on our current visibility into what we're seeing as well as the fact that our stock remains really cheap, we will continue to be aggressive buyers of our stock, and you should expect that it continues at a steady cadence, and we are on track to reducing our share count by a healthy amount as we go forward." — Balaji Krishnamurthy, incoming CFO

And the Khosrowshahi reinforcement:

"We can invest appropriately as it relates to growth. And then at the same time, we are going to continue reducing the share count because ultimately, all of us are shareholders, and we think right now the opportunity to buy back shares is pretty awesome." — Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO

Assessment: The combination of an explicit ~50% FCF return commitment, a $9.8B FCF base growing 42%, and management explicitly calling the stock cheap is a setup we don't see often. It removes capital-allocation risk from the thesis at the precise moment growth is reaccelerating.

U.S. Acceleration — The Unusual Posture

Mark Mahaney's opening on the U.S. acceleration question captured the surprise: businesses at this scale do not typically guide to acceleration. Krishnamurthy's answer was three-part — insurance flipping to leverage, the barbell product strategy gaining momentum at both ends (low and high both growing 40%), and sparse-market expansion in the U.S. running at 1.5x dense-market rates. The acceleration is not a single-quarter optical artifact:

"Throughout the last year, we have held prices relatively consistent. And as we look forward… we are in a position where insurance is going from a deleveraging cost item to something that gives us leverage… that allows us to hold prices flat or better in certain markets. So that price consistency has a huge impact on long-term elasticity of demand." — Balaji Krishnamurthy, incoming CFO

Assessment: The framework reset from price-pass-through-defending-margin to price-stability-driving-elasticity is the operative inflection. We weight this specifically as the single most important non-AV change in the FY26 setup.

Audience Growth and Membership Compounding

Khosrowshahi laid out a four-axis user-growth strategy: products (Moto, Reserve, Wait & Save), use cases (airport time-sensitive, Reserve), demographics (women preferred, teens, older), and geographies (international + sparse U.S.). Krishnamurthy's quantitative wrap was the headline:

"We started the year with MAPC growth at about 14% year-on-year. We ended the year with MAPC growth at 18% year-on-year, which is a very, very strong step up. And there's a lot of runway in front of us still as you look at that MAPC number at over 202 million monthly actives, our annual active base is over 450 million, and we are continuing to improve our penetration of that base." — Balaji Krishnamurthy, incoming CFO

Assessment: The 450M annual active base against 202M MAPC means there is structurally a 2.2x penetration runway from converting annual-active occasional riders into monthly-active habitual ones. New-cohort retention better than prior U.S. cohorts plus 55% Uber One growth means the cohorts being acquired are more valuable than the historical base.

Guidance — The FY 2026 Framework Reset

The FY26 framework was the most consequential disclosure on the call. Management did not provide a complete top-down P&L guide but laid out a coherent set of operational and capital-allocation commitments that reset the analytical framework. The headline pieces:

What's structurally new vs. our August/Q3 framework:

• Insurance flipping to leverage in U.S. — this is the single largest unit-economics change in the FY26 setup vs. FY25.
• U.S. accelerating, not just maintaining — an unusual posture at this scale, on a credible three-driver framework.
• AV deployment plan with 15-city target and named partner-by-partner economics — concretizes what was previously framed as optionality.
• Stock explicitly called cheap by the CFO against a ~50% FCF return commitment and a $9.8B base — sets a buyback floor.

What's NOT in the guide that the bear case will cite: No explicit FY26 EBITDA, FCF, or EPS dollar-guide; no explicit U.S. acceleration percentage; no explicit AV revenue contribution for 2026; no explicit Q1 2026 framework. The market will need to triangulate these from the framework, which keeps the post-print narrative diffuse and creates room for sell-side dispersion in the weeks ahead.

Analyst Q&A

The Q&A focused heavily on AV (four of six questions), with capital allocation, U.S. acceleration, and advertising/delivery rounding out the slate.

1. Justin Post (Bank of America) — Asked about AV competitive dynamics in major cities given Tesla and Waymo ramps and the disclosed 30% U.S. profit-pool concentration in top markets. Khosrowshahi reframed: AV deployments in San Francisco, Austin, and Atlanta have accelerated Uber's gross bookings in those cities, AVs on Uber's platform run ~30% higher trips-per-vehicle-per-day vs. 1P standalone networks, and Uber added 50x the platform trips last year that the entire AV industry added. Krishnamurthy added the 70%/75% sparse-market profit-share data.
2. Eric Sheridan (Goldman Sachs) — Asked about strategic priorities behind audience growth and the Uber One evolution over the next 12–18 months. Khosrowshahi laid out the four-axis growth framework (products, use cases, demographics, geographies). Krishnamurthy quantified: MAPC accelerating from +14% to +18% through 2025, 450M annual actives vs. 202M MAPC, 40% multi-product Q4 share, Uber One +55%.
3. Brian Nowak (Morgan Stanley) — Two-part: AV winner-take-most concern given safety scaling, and capital-return philosophy at 50% FCF. Khosrowshahi argued AV looks more like the OEM industry (many manufacturers, local champions) than a winner-take-all software platform, and that Waymo's $110B valuation is a positive read on the category, not a signal of single-winner consolidation. Krishnamurthy reaffirmed the ~50% framework and called the stock cheap.
4. Mark Mahaney (Evercore) — Asked about the U.S. trip and gross-bookings acceleration into 2026 and the AV capital-intensity philosophy. Krishnamurthy delivered the insurance/pricing/barbell/sparse framework. Khosrowshahi laid out the financialization architecture for AV fleet ownership (private equity, banks, fleet operators, REIT-style structures) and confirmed Uber will commit equity capital to unlock supply where it must.
5. Doug Anmuth (JPMorgan) — Asked about data and simulation accelerating AV 2.0 software players, and the 15-city unlocks for 2026. Khosrowshahi described the NVIDIA partnership for a real-world AV data factory targeting 3M+ hours, the simulation capabilities (with Waabi cited as a leader), and the 15-city deployment requirements (depot real estate, charging, GR, safety case, OEM capacity). Krishnamurthy added that scale is going to be a question of avoiding bottlenecks, particularly OEM production capacity.
6. Michael Morton (MoffettNathanson) — Asked about AV deployment stages and duration to scale. Krishnamurthy laid out a three-stage progression: (1) baseload supply at trough demand, (2) vehicle platform cost coming down to expand TAM, (3) eventually majority of supply from AVs in select markets, with the long-term endpoint described as "far, far away" relative to current OEM ramp curves. Khosrowshahi added that Uber's freight+delivery+mobility utilization stack is the structural moat versus single-product AV networks.
7. John Colantuoni (Jefferies) — Final question. Asked about long-term delivery advertising potential and the drivers of delivery growth acceleration to multi-year highs. Krishnamurthy disclosed that the 2% delivery-ad penetration ceiling has been exceeded with SMB above 2% and enterprise outpacing SMB on growth. Khosrowshahi enumerated the five delivery growth vectors (selection, sparse markets, grocery/retail, membership, international expansion).

Q&A read: No questions on margins, take-rate compression risk, or competitive pricing dynamics — an absence that suggests the sell-side is converging with management on the FY26 framework. The four AV questions confirm AV is the dominant analytical debate; the answers consistently emphasized 3P utilization advantage, partner-deal economics being healthy and positive, and OEM capacity as the binding constraint.

What They're NOT Saying

A few notable absences worth flagging:

• No specific FY26 EBITDA, FCF, or EPS dollar-guide. Management gave a framework with directional commitments (U.S. accelerating, ~50% FCF capital return, AV partner economics positive) but no point estimates. This leaves Street consensus to triangulate from the framework, and is consistent with management's posture in prior years — but it does mean post-print Street dispersion will be wider than it would be with a tighter guide.
• No explicit AV revenue contribution for 2026. The 15-city deployment is a unit-volume target, not a revenue-contribution disclosure. We expect the first material contribution to begin showing in H2 2026 disclosures, but management is choosing not to anchor the Street to a number yet — understandable given OEM capacity is the binding constraint.
• No detail on the Mahendra-Rajah successor opportunity. Outgoing CFO described it as "serving America" without specifics. We do not view this as a thesis-relevant disclosure issue; the operational continuity from Krishnamurthy is what matters.
• No update on the Postmates/Drizly margin profile or any specific delivery sub-segment unit economics. Delivery is framed as a growth story; segment-level margin progression is implied to be improving (the OI compounding from the Q3 baseline is the read) but not quantified.
• No commentary on labor / driver-classification regulatory risk. Notably absent from a quarter where this has historically been on the call. The absence likely reflects the relative regulatory calm in the U.S. as IC-vs-employee classification frameworks continue to settle market-by-market — not a structural change in management's risk view.
• No M&A signals. "Selective bolt-on" was reaffirmed as a capital-allocation priority but no specific deal architecture was suggested. The capital structure is positioned for opportunism without commitment.

Market Reaction

Press-release timing was pre-market on February 4; the call ran in the morning ET. Per the pre-publish information available at our cutoff, the initial reaction was constructive on the framework signal — the U.S. acceleration commentary, the ~50% FCF return reaffirmation, and the AV concretization were each individually well-received. The CFO transition was treated as an idiosyncratic and well-handled change rather than a thesis disruption. The absence of an explicit FY26 dollar-guide kept the post-print sell-side dispersion wide enough that the stock did not move to a single price target consensus immediately.

The post-print read most likely to dominate the next 30 days: which sell-side analysts upgrade their price targets to reflect the U.S. acceleration, the AV partner-economics disclosure, and the doubled visibility on capital return. We expect the dispersion to narrow upward as the framework is digested.

Street Perspective

The Street consensus into the print was anchored to high-teens gross-bookings growth, mid-30s EBITDA growth, and continued FCF compounding — with AV treated as long-dated optionality rather than a 2026 driver, and the U.S. business assumed to mature at single-digit growth rates over the medium term. The Q4 print and FY26 framework are structurally above each of these anchor assumptions.

The bull case being made on the Street has emphasized the audience-acceleration story (MAPC inflection from +14% to +18%), the multiproduct flywheel (40% of Q4 consumers using more than one product), the ~50% FCF capital-return framework, and the AV partner architecture. The bear case has emphasized: take-rate compression risk as AV partners scale, competitive intensity from Tesla's ride-hailing entry, U.S. labor classification regulatory tail, and the question of whether buybacks can keep pace with FCF growth without eventually requiring incremental leverage.

Our read versus the consensus: we are above the consensus framework on the U.S. trajectory (insurance flipping to leverage is a meaningful multi-year unlock that is not yet priced into mature Street models), in line on AV (concrete enough now to underwrite, but still long-dated for 2026 contribution), and above on capital return (the cadence implied by ~50% of $9.8B-and-growing on a stock management calls cheap is a buyback envelope materially larger than what is reflected in current share-count modeling).

Model Implications — The FY 2026 Setup

The Q4 print and FY26 framework reset our model in three primary ways:

1. U.S. mobility growth path raised. Insurance reflation moves U.S. mobility from a low-single-digit segment growth assumption to a mid-to-high-single-digit assumption, with corresponding margin uplift as insurance flips from a deleveraging line to a leverage line. The barbell product strategy (Wait & Save / Moto on the low end, Reserve / XXL / shuttle on the high end) compounds the addressable-market expansion.
2. AV revenue contribution timeline brought forward. The 15-city target by year-end 2026 implies first meaningful AV revenue contribution in H2 2026, with margins explicitly framed as "healthy positive" by management. We do not yet model AV as a material 2026 contributor (partial-year deployment ramping into capacity), but H2 disclosure should reset the FY27 trajectory.
3. Share count reduction trajectory steepened. The ~50% FCF return framework on a $9.8B base growing 42% sizes the buyback envelope at an order of magnitude that materially reduces share count over 24 months. EPS growth from share-count alone is a high-single-digit tailwind on top of operating EPS growth.

Net: the FY26 EBITDA framework remains a high-30s growth posture at the line, with FCF compounding into a buyback envelope that supports double-digit per-share earnings growth even before AV contribution layers in. The structural setup is the most constructive of our coverage period.

Thesis Scorecard — State of the Thesis at End-FY 2025

Overall: Three open questions at our Q1 initiation — U.S. mobility re-acceleration, AV transition economics, capital-return scaling — have each resolved positively at end-FY 2025. Every confirmable thesis pillar has confirmed or strengthened, and the new disclosures (insurance flipping to leverage, 15-city AV target, 80%-plus partner-economics positive on AV deals being struck now, 46M Uber One members) are each independently strong. The single watch item is CFO transition execution, which we treat as a near-term watch rather than a thesis-relevant risk.

Action: Maintaining Outperform. Our coverage thesis arc — Initiated Hold (Q1) → Upgraded to Outperform (Q2) → Maintained Outperform (Q3) → Maintaining Outperform (Q4) — has now reached the point where the FY26 setup, the structural improvements in U.S. unit economics, the AV concretization, and the capital-return cadence collectively extend the constructive case we upgraded on at Q2 rather than create a new one. Watch items for the next 90 days: (1) Q1 2026 print quality relative to the U.S. acceleration framework, (2) initial CFO communication discipline from Krishnamurthy on the FY26 framework, (3) early signals on the 15-city AV deployment cadence and partner ramp.