WHEN: Today, Thursday, February 10
WHERE: CNBC’s Business Day Programming
Following are excerpts from the unofficial transcript of a FIRST ON CNBC interview with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin. Excerpts aired during CNBC’s Business Day programming today, Thursday, February 10. The full interview will air tomorrow, Friday, February 11 on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” (6AM-9AM ET).
All references must be sourced to CNBC.
KHOSROWSHAHI ON WHEN UBER WILL REACH PROFITABILITY
We targeted free cash flow profitability this year. And I think true profitability, GAAP profitability, is probably the year after. You know, we were GAAP profitable this quarter if you want to be technical about it. But ultimately, we want to be free cash flow profitable and GAAP profitable for the foreseeable future. And I think with a roadmap that we’ve laid out with targets in 2024, it’s an absolute. It’s going to happen.
KHOSROWSHAHI ON UBER’S FUTURE PRICING POWER
We have seen significant pricing power within the platform. Now we’re marketplace. So it goes both way which is pricing to the consumer, and also cost to our earners. The unfortunate part of the CPI data is cars are costing more, fuel is costing more. And as a result when you look at our pricing, while our pricing has gone up on average on a year-on-year basis – gross bookings grew faster than trips – earnings for our earners are actually increasing faster than gross bookings.
KHOSROWSHAHI ON DIGITAL ADVERTISING AND GOOGLE VERSUS FACEBOOK
We absolutely saw our spend on Facebook come down on let’s say quarter on quarter basis as a result of the changes that happened.
KHOSROWSHAHI ON FUTURE PROFITS
Guidance of 25 to 75 million for this quarter and we beat it. You know, we are in the middle of a pandemic. And you’ve seen so many companies have a tough time forecasting what the next quarter is going to be let alone the next year. So when we put a target like that down of $5 billion in profit by 2024, which is a big number and it’s like much higher than anyone else in the category, it’s a target that we are quite confident of. And there are many roads we can take to that target. And if some things go right, I feel quite good that we can exceed that target. But it is a good target to lay during a period of high uncertainty.
