In what is likely to be the final earnings report from Uber Freight before it is transformed through its acquisition of Transplace, the digital brokerage reported a third-quarter revenue increase of 39% over the third quarter of last year and 15.5% sequentially.
Uber reported late last week, in conjunction with its release of corporate earnings, that Uber Freight had $402 million of revenue in the third quarter, compared sequentially to $348 million in the second quarter and $290 million a year ago.
Those sorts of numbers may have led CEO Dara Khosrowshahi to tell analysts on the company’s quarterly earnings call that the “great” quarter at Uber Freight “should put to rest the many questions we’ve gotten, not always unfairly, about whether the unit economics of this business work.”
“The answer is a resounding yes,” Khosrowshahi said, according to a transcript of the earning call supplied by SeekingAlpha. “But as I’ve said to the team, now the real work begins. Looking ahead, as we’ve done in the past, we’ll continue to make investments that will set us up to succeed in the next frontiers of opportunity and deliver exceptional value to all of our stakeholders.”
That work will involve the ultimate acquisition of Transplace and its integration. Khosrowshahi said on the earnings call that the company expects to close the acquisition in the fourth quarter. The CEO said the acquisition will help Uber Freight as “we move towards a vision of connecting first-, mid- and last-mile logistics across the Uber platform.”
The acquisition of Transplace by Uber Freight is seen as a unique step in the industry to put both carriers and shippers on the same platform. Possibly with that in mind, Khosrowshahi, in his few remarks on the earnings call and in the company’s press release directed at Uber Freight, spoke about the number of new shippers the company had signed up to the platform.
He said the company had “onboarded” 91 new enterprise/midmarket shippers in 2021 through the third quarter and had received “best service” honors from two major shippers, LG Electronic and Target.
“We see a massive opportunity to disrupt the freight brokerage industry with our technology, which now connects more than 1 million carriers to shippers,” Khosrowshahi said.
As for carriers, Khosrowshahi said the total carrier base at Uber Freight has grown almost 50% compared to the first three quarters of 2020.
EBITDA at Uber Freight was negative $35 million for the quarter, or 8.7% of revenue. That marked better than a 50% increase from the $73 million in negative EBITDA in the third quarter of last year, and was also improved from a negative $41 million EBITDA performance in the second quarter of this year. The high water mark for EBITDA at Uber Freight is the negative $29 million posted in the first quarter of this year.
More articles by John Kingston
Wall Street analysis puts value of Uber Freight at $3.5 billion
Poised for acquisition, Transplace gets mostly positive outlook from Moody’s
Uber Freight’s Q4 numbers up from 2019 and from third quarter
