Uber's S-1 says the company had 91M average monthly active users, including for ride-hailing and Uber Eats, at the end of 2018, up 33.8% YoY
Joshua Franklin / Reuters : Tweets: @prsarahevans Tweets: @prsarahevans : UBER'S CURRENT STATUS: 🚗 91M average monthly active users 🚘 Ride-hailing and @UberEats ⬆️ Up 33.8% YoY, but slowing 💰 Revenue of $11.3 billion in 2018 via @Techmeme / @reutersjf http://reuters.com/......
Context & Ripple Effects
The S-1 lands after a stretch where every Uber disclosure paired big top-line numbers with deepening losses: the company had reported losing $4.5B on $7.5B in sales for 2017, and its Q4 2018 results showed gross bookings up 37% while adjusted EBITDA losses widened 88% YoY. The filing's headline stat — 91M monthly active users, up 33.8% — is the scale argument Uber needs before pricing its IPO.
The second thing the S-1 quietly establishes is that the user base is no longer just ride-hailing: UberEats was only about 10% of the business a year earlier, and the combined-user metric folds Eats into the growth story. That framing sets up how the market reads everything Uber reports afterward.
First-order effects
- Public investors now get a single blended user metric covering both businesses, so the decelerating 33.8% growth rate becomes the number analysts test against Uber's valuation rather than raw revenue of $11.3B.
- Uber Eats gets recast from side business to core growth engine inside the same filing, changing which internal metrics — Eats users vs. riders — management is judged on each quarter.
Second-order effects
- Within months the strategy shows in the numbers: by August 2019 Uber counts 99 million active consumers overall with Eats users up 140% YoY, meaning nearly all incremental user growth is coming from the food-delivery side of the platform.
- A larger cross-sell base raises the stakes on courier and driver supply — Uber must keep adding couriers to serve Eats demand generated off the same rider funnel it built for rides.
Third-order effects
- The multi-service single-account model eventually becomes the profitability story: by late 2023 Uber posts its first quarterly net income on record driver counts, and by 2025 it generates $1.1B in quarterly operating income — the payoff of monetizing one user base across two categories instead of subsidizing one.
- If the pattern holds, marketplace platforms are judged less on user-count growth alone and more on revenue extracted per account as the user curve flattens.
The trend: Two-sided marketplaces are shifting their equity stories from subscriber growth to per-user monetization across multiple services, with food delivery as the second act that carries the growth after ride-hailing matures.