There was little positive in the Uber Freight portion of Uber Technologies’ fourth-quarter earnings as its revenue and bottom line continue to languish.
Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization at the digital brokerage and TMS provider remained negative at minus $14 million and now hasn’t seen a positive number for six quarters. The last time there was black ink in Uber Freight’s EBITDA was the third quarter of 2022, when it eked out a $1 million positive EBITDA. The subsequent five quarters were negative $8 million, $23 million, $14 million, $13 million and now $14 million, respectively.
Even worse, revenue at Uber Freight fell slightly on a sequential basis and remains stuck near where it came in for the final three quarters of last year, well below the numbers first reported starting in 2022 after Uber Freight closed on its acquisition of Transplace in the fourth quarter of 2021.
Revenue of $1.28 billion was only slightly higher than the recent low of $1.279 billion posted in the second quarter of 2023. The sequential decline was small, coming off third-quarter revenue of $1.286 billion.
Fourth-quarter revenue was 16.8% less than the fourth quarter of 2022.
The latest results close out 2023, during which Uber Freight opened the year with revenue of $1.4 billion but then watched it decline for the rest of the year.
It’s not easy to benchmark Uber Freight performance against that of peers. Earnings from RXO (NYSE: RXO) don’t come out until Thursday, and that 3PL increasingly considers itself a digital broker.
But so, to a degree, does C.H. Robinson (NASDAQ: CHRW), and the brokerage revenue falloff over the course of the year at that company was relatively close to what happened at Uber Freight.
C.H. Robinson’s earnings were considered extremely weak. Its stock is down about 13% since the earnings release Thursday.
The North American Surface Transportation segment at C.H. Robinson, which is where the company’s brokerage activities sit, posted revenue in the first quarter of 2023 of $3.3 billion. In the fourth quarter, that was down to $3 billion, a decline of just over 9%.
At Uber Freight, the slide from first-quarter revenue of $1.4 billion down to $1.28 billion at the end of the year was an 8.6% drop.
Fourth-quarter 2022 revenue at C.H. Robinson’s NAST group was $3.56 billion, and the drop to $3 billion was 15.7%. That is slightly less than the 16.8% revenue decline posted at Uber Freight between the fourth quarter of 2022 and the final quarter of 2023.
Uber Freight was not mentioned on the fourth-quarter earnings call of the parent company (NYSE: UBER). Uber Technologies’ quarterly earnings were considered positive, and its stock hit a 52-week high Wednesday.
But the prepared statement released with Uber Freight’s earnings highlighted several developments over the quarter, including its revised TMS.
Uber Freight President Lior Ron led a public rollout of the new TMS in October. In the earnings statement, the company said it had onboarded “several” new customers to the TMS.
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