LYFT Earnings Call

OperatorGood afternoon and welcome to Lyft's first quarter 2026 earnings call. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. On the call today, we have CEO David Risher and our CFO Erin Brewer. Our full prepared remarks are available on the IR website, and we'll use this time to answer your questions. We'll make forward-looking statements on today's call, including statements relating to our business strategy and performance, partnerships, future financial and operating results, Trends in our marketplace and guidance. These statements are subject to risk and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those projected or implied during this call. These factors and risks are described in our earnings materials and in our recent SEC filings. All of the forward-looking statements that we make today's call are based on beliefs as of today, and we disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law.

OperatorAdditionally, today we're going to discuss customers. For rideshare in North America, there are generally two customers in every car: the driver's Lyft customer and the rider's Lyft customer. We care about both. Our discussion today will also include non-GAAP financial measures, which are not a substitute for GAAP results. Reconciliation of our historical GAAP to non-GAAP results can be found in our earnings materials, which are available on our IR website. And with that, I'll pass the call to David.

David RisherThank you, Erin. Hello, everyone. Listen, Q1 represented another strong quarter for Lyft. We again delivered on our financial commitments and again had double-digit growth in active riders, gross bookings, and adjusted EBITDA year over year, further setting ourselves up for a global hybrid AV future. Rideshare demand remained healthy. We saw double-digit rides growth around peak events like Valentine's Day, Super Bowl Sunday, St. Patrick's Day. Stepping back, our share of the US rideshare market has grown from the 3 years ago when I joined and has held above that point ever since, with an increase in Q1 over last quarter. And in March, we delivered our highest ever number of rides in a week. Taken together with our financial results, this continues to validate our thesis that customer obsession drives profitable growth. Looking globally, we're now operating in over 120 countries around the world, and have further deepened our presence in London with our acquisition of Gett's UK business, which we just officially closed this week.

David RisherAnd finally, we took significant steps forward with our partner Waymo in Nashville with the construction of a state-of-the-art AV depot. We continue to be extremely bullish about AV's ability to expand our market and about our own capacity to operate them at industry-leading utilization levels. The ultimate driver profitability. And with that, let me turn it over to Erin to take you through a few financial highlights.

Erin BrewerThanks, David. The consistent execution David just described translated directly to strong financial results. In the first quarter, gross bookings were up 19% and adjusted EBITDA up 25% year over year. Over the last 12 months, we've generated a record $1.12 billion in free cash flow And during Q1, we executed our largest quarterly share repurchase ever, totaling $300 million in the quarter. Looking forward, our guidance reflects continued momentum across the business. At the midpoint of our range, we expect gross bookings to accelerate to approximately 20% and adjusted EBITDA to expand by more than 30% year over year. And with that, we'll take your questions.

OperatorLet's dive into Q&A. If you have joined via the webinar, please use the raise hand icon, which can be found at the bottom of your application. When you are called on, please unmute your line and ask your question. Please limit to one question. We'll now pause for a moment to assemble.

David RisherOkay.

OperatorFirst question comes from Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs.

Eric SheridanOkay, great. Hopefully you can hear me okay. Wanted to dive into the partnerships and how they continue to evolve. What are the key learnings as these partnerships continue to build in their momentum and build in their duration in terms of them as stimulants of increased frequency on your platform or stimulants of increased, uh, new rider growth on the platform more broadly? Would love to get a, a better sense of color there. Appreciate it.

David RisherSure. Hey Eric, it's David. Um, I'll take it, maybe Erin will tag team on me a little bit here as well. So super good question, and I think I'm just going to maybe reset the table for one second because I think the role of partnerships continues to be incredibly important to our current business and will be incredibly important in our AV business. So how we perform as a partner I think is actually a good predictor, and how our partners perform is a good predictor of the future. OK, so to your question, we got a record number of rides this quarter from partnership-tagged rides, ride requests, so about 27%, I think. That's a big deal. I think when we first started talking about this, we were 20%, then 22%, then 25%, and then 27%. Why? Two reasons. Number one, we partner with great organizations that have huge TAMs, right? So if you look at some of our most recent ones, of course, DoorDash is still only about a year and a half old.

David RisherUnited is more recent, even Southwest Airlines through their credit card program. These are enormous programs. And so they represent a huge opportunity for us to acquire new customers. Now, those— I'll come back to frequency in a second. Those customers are different, right? So for example, DoorDash customers tend to be very heavy users, and you can understand this, right? People eat 3 times a day and they tend to take rides relatively more often than others. So you saw us obviously complete, you know, double down on that partnership by expanding that to Canada. Okay, you look at United Airlines, you know, this is kind of a different vibe, right? They tend to be more business customers that, you know, we out-index in some of the United's big hubs, Chicago being a good example where we had great growth this past year. They tend to be airport rides, not surprisingly, which means higher bookings per ride, which tends to mean higher profits.

David RisherSo that's wonderful. How do we reward United customers? Well, we give them miles, which they've done for years now. I think we're over 350 million miles awarded, 350 million miles awarded right around there. That's a big deal. And then a couple of weeks ago, we announced Pay with Miles, which is amazing. I mean, that's literally, I don't know how many billions of miles or hundreds of millions maybe United has banked, but This allows United MileagePlus customers to pay with, you know, with their miles on Lyft. And that's wonderful. It's an industry first and it deepens that relationship. So you put all these things together and you get sort of a portfolio. Some tend to drive frequency and new customer acquisition a little bit more. Some tend to drive, you know, other behaviors that we kind of like, like airport rides and so forth. But super, super important. Maybe I'll talk about AV partners another time.

David RisherI don't think that was the sort of core of your question, but that's— we remain very committed to that. So the concept of sort of really developing the ecosystem and going deeper and deeper in the TAM, which is quite large.

David RisherGreat. Thank you.

Erin BrewerSure.

OperatorGreat. The next question will be Doug from JPMorgan.

Neeraj KookadaHi, this is Neeraj Kookada on for Doug. So a couple of questions. One is on the SF commentary. I think you guys mentioned that you have continued to gain share and also saw rides increase by 20%.

Neeraj KookadaIn the ODD. So just curious, given, you know, Uber has said their CP, uh, has gained— they have gained CP in the last, uh, 6 months as well. So just trying to understand the share dynamics there, like, are you gaining share, uh, from Waymo, or like, how does the share dynamics work there? And the next one was, are you, uh, have you started seeing any, um, uh, elasticity from the California insurance mandate. Yeah, thank you.

David RisherSure, why don't I take the first half and then Erin, you can take the second half. So broadly speaking, as we've said before, you know, we think AVs are an incredible positive for rideshare. And really it's because it's a great product and therefore you would expect over time that's gonna bring new people, you know, onto the sort of into the rideshare ecosystem. And when we look across sort of in aggregate, all of the regions where AVs are in the marketplace, We've effectively held share pretty steady. So that's kind of a good indication because it means that as new riders are coming on, still the whole pie is growing. San Francisco, we're doing great. As we said, we actually had an increase. We've had nice growth in San Francisco. These things are always multivariable. We're also doing some marketing in San Francisco. So that is sort of a maybe confounding factor. But we like what we see in San Francisco.

David RisherI will say, when I look at what the other guys say, they maybe pick 6 months for a particular reason. I'm not sure. Broadly speaking, I feel pretty good about our position in SF.

Erin BrewerYeah, and happy to comment on California. So on our previous earnings conference call, we talked about obviously the insurance reform in California that we expected to deliver great value to riders and to drivers. We further talked about how we expected that to translate into increasing demand over time and sort of gaining momentum in the back half of the year. Um, I can sit here today and tell you that as we got into sort of February, March, and even in here to the second quarter, we are seeing that growth begin in California. That growth in the first quarter outpaced other top regions, and so we're starting to see those effects. We obviously look forward to that momentum continuing for the balance of the year.

Neeraj KookadaGot it. Thank you both.

Erin BrewerThank you.

OperatorSure. Our next question will be Nikhil Devnani from Bernstein.

Nikhil DevnaniHey, thank you for taking the question. I wanted to ask about the rides growth and appreciate the call out in the letter.

Erin BrewerThat's helpful.

OperatorThank you.

Nikhil DevnaniSo the mid-single-digit North America volume, if I'm reading it right, it looks like Canada is growing much faster, almost 50%. So it'd be helpful if you could maybe just outline what you saw in the US business on a ride volume basis, and I guess the big picture factors that maybe weighed on that in the quarter. It seems like it's decelerated over the last few quarters. So just your perspective on what's happening there would be really helpful. Thank you.

David RisherYeah, for sure. Hey, Nikhil Devnani. So a couple of things. I mean, the first thing to think— well, so okay, let's just sort of maybe level set on the data and then talk about what we're seeing. So on the data, we grew both in the United States and in Canada.

David RisherCanada, to be super clear. Um, no question Canada outgrew the US. I, I don't think it was quite to the degree you're talking about, but it was a very significant growth. I mean, we did grow something like 50% year on year in Canada. I get that a little bit wrong. Um, anyway, okay, so look, so North America, let's think about that, and then the US. North America, huge region, of course, um, super diverse, a lot of geographies and a lot of segments within those geographies. What we have seen is in Canada for sure, but also low-scale markets that we've been talking about for now, I don't know, 6 or 7 quarters, That's where we are seeing our sort of outsized growth, uh, for sure. Low-scale markets, again, you can sort of imagine those as maybe the Milwaukees of the world, or maybe the Pittsburghs, whatever it might be. But sometimes second and third-tier cities, or even more rural areas where there's a huge amount of TAM, you know, left, and it's sort of underpenetrated.

David RisherUm, and then obviously in some of the cities, particularly the largest cities where rideshare has been active the longest, I would say the industry on average is seeing slightly lower rates of growth, or at least did see this past quarter. And I think that's an industry thing, and it has a lot to do just with kind of S-curves and being in markets for a long, long time. Okay. So once you look at that, then you say, "Well, okay, how are you going to reaccelerate growth in some of those markets?" And that's where some of the segments I think become so interesting. So you've heard us, of course, talk about Lyft Silver, which addresses older people who, by the way, take a lot of rides. And even on our platform, once they become Silver members, they take a lot more rides. Lyft Teen, still a very, very new product, huge opportunity there, one that obviously is sort of infinitely replenishing, you sort of might say.

David RisherYou look at the partnerships that we have in some major cities. DoorDash is a great— obviously, they've got both urban and suburban footprint, but anyway, they've got a nationwide footprint. You look at United Airlines, they've got real hubs, and some of those hubs are where we're seeing really good growth. We saw, for example, double-digit growth in both New York and in San Francisco. Part of that, of course, is also some marketing. We're now really leaning into this idea of Check Lyft. What we find, and of course, national studies show, is that when people check both apps, they tend to save money. That's a very powerful message and frankly one that favors us, both because of our pricing strategy and also if you're not even looking at our app, then how can you be saving money? So there's a lot of room left there to go. So when I look across all those, I see a lot of vectors for growth. It's why we're saying our rides are going to accelerate.

David RisherOverall, we're seeing acceleration in Q2 and beyond. And maybe I'll turn it over to Erin to talk a little bit about that and then maybe some other things as well.

Erin BrewerSure, yeah, I'll offer a little bit of color, Nikhil Devnani. You know, in our prepared remarks, we quantified the impact that we saw that weather in the first quarter had on our overall rides, roughly about 3 million rides. You can think about that as a little bit more than half of that being bike rides overall, obviously given the severity of the weather in the Northeast. Beyond that, I think it's important to highlight a couple of seasonal factors, right? We always have a deceleration naturally in the bikes business, Q4 to Q1, same with FreeNow. Those both seasonally accelerate into the second quarter. So that, in addition to a number of the areas that David just mentioned, I talked about California, we've got a very healthy marketplace right now as well. Those are some of the underlying factors as we think about acceleration. Into Q2. And then maybe zooming out a little bit more broadly, really nothing has changed as we think about our trajectory here in 2026 and our overall objective to deliver north of 1 billion rides for the full year.

OperatorThank you very much.

OperatorNext question will be Benjamin Black from Deutsche.

Benjamin BlackGreat. Thank you for taking my questions. So a theme this quarter has been AI productivity and sort of the investments companies are making sort of into tokens, for instance. So I'm wondering how you think philosophically about, you know, sort of balancing the need to maintain your improving margin trajectory today versus growing talent and also investing in these tools to support productivity? And then secondly, you know, I'd be curious to hear what you're seeing in the market this quarter that required you to increase incentives per ride by 17%. Could you maybe touch on that as well, please?

OperatorSure.

David RisherAgain, we'll sort of tag team this. So I mean, maybe just state the obvious. Yeah, I mean, AI is amazing. It's just, it is rolling through our org just like every other org. You know, it's sort of a lightning pace. I was looking at AI adoption recently just among the developers, our engineers, and just with a new tool— we have a strategic relationship with Claude, and a new tool has gotten to 80-some percent adoption over the course of whatever, 35 days, 45 days, uh, AI, the, the code generation tool there. So anyway, you know, amazing. Now, how we think about it— I know you asked specifically about the cost of tokens and so forth, but just zooming out for a second, how we really think about it is AI builds capacity. It actually does two things: it builds capacity and it increases speed. So capacity and velocity. That's the way we think about it. And we see examples of this all across the organization.

David RisherYou know, we've talked a couple of different times about becoming a more global org. Gosh, when you become a more global org, you have to do all kinds of things around data and privacy and security and systems integration and so forth. And, you know, truthfully, a lot of that is not particularly customer value-add, but you just have to do it. And our team has just been crushing it. And a lot of the reasons they've been crushing it without having to hire a bunch of new people is we're relying on new AI tools that we've written internally or developed, you know, co-developed with others and so forth. That allows us to get things done. Same with customer-facing things. We'll talk about that maybe another time. It's kind of a whole separate topic. But broadly speaking, I'd say we run a pretty lean ship. And what AI is allowing us to do is to move faster and to build capacity among our staff so that they can either be more productive or work on more things simultaneously or what have you.

Erin BrewerSure, I'll take the question on incentives and sort of start with our usual line about, you know, incentives in this business, which fall in two places in our P&L, the contra revenue line and sales and marketing line. Are used dynamically in the marketplace to balance and optimize overall. You know, stepping back, that's why we always say that we are optimizing our P&L as we think about gross bookings, as we think about adjusted EBITDA. So I think that's important context. So let's kind of get into the details on the incentive line. If you think about Contra revenue incentives overall on a year-over-year basis, that's actually been a source of leverage. And in the first quarter, we had our highest driver hours ever in the first quarter, you know, very strong engagement overall. We talked a little bit in the prepared remarks about our most recent driver preference survey. Again, super strong results.

Erin BrewerSo you see some leverage there in the Contra revenue line. And then as, as I think about sales and marketing incentives, I think it's really important to chat about this from a P&L perspective. So if you, if you look at our performance in the quarter, You see strong revenue growth. You see gross margins expanding year over year. You know, I mentioned insurance being a point of leverage. So that's aided by that. We, of course, continue with our very disciplined fixed cost base. Why is all of that important to incentive? Because those are the things that can continue to allow us to invest when we see great return opportunities to invest in that rider incentive line. We do it very deliberately. We do it very focused on what the ROI is over the long term. And so some of that strong performance throughout our P&L gave us the opportunity to take advantage of some of those strong investment opportunities, especially at a time when the marketplace is performing so well.

Erin BrewerAnd we delivered across all of our financial commitments. So hopefully that gives you a little bit of color about how we manage that piece in the quarter.

Benjamin BlackGreat. Yes, thank you.

OperatorNext question is John Blackledge with TD Cowen.

OperatorJohn? Hey, John, we're going to come back to you, okay?

Erin BrewerWe're going to go to Michael Morton with MoffettNathanson then.

OperatorOh, I can hear somebody. Is that John?

John BlackledgeYeah, sorry, sorry. First time Zoom.

Erin BrewerNo, it's okay.

John BlackledgeI'm kidding. First time Zoom call fan.

John BlackledgeCould you talk about the strength in the high-value modes and how much run— runway there is for further penetration of total rides? And then second question, would you expect this kind of divergence between GB growth and rides volume growth to extend into the second half, or will the gap close a bit as we, as we get through the second half? Thank you.

David RisherYeah, let's, um, we'll tag team on that one again. So, um, lot of runway there, lot of, or headroom maybe is a better way to say it. It's just You know, this is an area where I would say Lyft may be underinvested for some period of time and now has completely made up for lost time, let's say. So we're really focusing on improving the quality of the cars, the types of drivers, you know, some drivers who drive for Black and high-value modes. So we call this Black XL, even XXL, actually a new product for big families. Anyway, the types of drivers, you know, we're sort of, let's say, shifting towards a more professional set of drivers there. Of course, TBR also, you know, operates in the very high-end kind of chauffeur service as well. So lots of growth there and lots of runway ahead, I would say. It's been an area that over the last couple of quarters you've heard us talk about the acceleration, and we have, you know, big ambitions there because there's a lot of demand to fill with a high-quality product.

Erin BrewerYeah, and I'll take the one on gross bookings and rides growth rates. So if you think about the dynamic there in the first quarter, there's a couple of different components. Obviously, part of what you're seeing is this continuation of a very active shift toward higher-value modes. We've been talking about that for a few quarters. Um, the first quarter of that growth is up over 35% year over year. Obviously, adding in the Free Now business, which carries a higher average gross bookings per ride, is helpful. And then, um, separately but correspondingly, we continue to diversify the things that add to our gross bookings, where there may not be a ride attached, things like ads and luxury, uh, for example. And so those are some of the dynamics that driving that. If you think about expectations for the second quarter, I do expect that delta between gross bookings growth and rides growth to narrow somewhat.

Erin BrewerUm, you've got the significant seasonal expansion of the bikes business, I think is probably one of the main underlying drivers. So it will narrow somewhat as you think about those trends from Q1 to Q2.

OperatorThank you.

John BlackledgeThanks.

OperatorOkay. Now we really are going to take a question from Michael Morton at MoffettNathanson.

Erin BrewerAwesome.

Michael MortonThank you. It was nice knowing that it was coming.

Michael MortonTwo, if I can. Time to prepare. Yeah, I had time to prepare, but it was going to be the same questions anyways. Can we talk about pricing in the U.S. market? All inter-quarter we get questions from clients about what the third-party data shows for industry pricing, kind of head-scratching, um, kind of ramp. And then when we see this reported number, I, I know that there's some free now aspect on it, but can we maybe just simplify it, like point blank, um, what year-over-year pricing is for like a Lyft standard ride? I know there's a premiumization aspect, but just to kind of level set that and any nuance around that would be really helpful. And then another question, I'd love to hear how you're feeling about your ads business, maybe some updates on the run rate there and if anything's changed on your outlook for the future, if you're more optimistic or anything along those lines would be really great.

Michael MortonThank you so much.

Erin BrewerDavid, do you want to start with the ads business and I'll talk about Totally. Talk about pricing.

OperatorOkay.

David RisherErin and I are chuckling here in the background. Um, yeah, that sounds good. Uh, so, okay. On ads, ads, as we said, we've said, we've talked about ads for a while, I think, and talked about how, uh, we were super pleased with sort of the run rate, the exit rate from last year. I think the sort of big picture that we have on this is, gosh, there's a lot of opportunity. And the reason for it is, you know, advertisers are always looking for new ways to connect with customers. And in an increasingly virtualized world where people are spending more and more time on their phones. The big open question is not how do I do more virtual, digital ads. I mean, that is a fairly well-solved problem in a sense. What's really interesting is how do you actually connect that to the physical world? And so if you look at some of the campaigns we've done, we talked about Sephora last time, we talked about a Charles Schwab ad campaign this time that I think in our prepared remarks, actually I think just today we're doing something with McDonald's.

David RisherYou start to see some really interesting trends where people are literally changing behavior as a result of being in cars when they're seeing ads in real time. Oh, also bikes here in San Francisco. Gemini is all over the bike system here. So same sort of deal, of course, Citi across all of New York City. So a lot of opportunities there. And then when you start to look at the audience we have, which is a fairly large audience, talking about 50 million people plus, then the question is, well, how can you take that audience and extend that? And so we're doing something called audience extension, which allows us to extend beyond our four walls. How can you take some of that same data and extend that beyond the in-car experience to off-platform, through Trade Desk and through other ad brokers? So there's just a lot of opportunity here. And the person, I call her out from time to time, the person who runs our ad group, Suzie Reider, joined us from YouTube a couple of years ago, where she had run their ad business for many years, really started it, and then kind of grew it to something quite big.

David RisherAnd we've got the same amount of conviction here. You know, it may not be quite the same size as YouTube. That would be impressive. But certainly, we've got a lot of conviction that there's a lot of headroom ahead.

Erin BrewerYeah, Michael Morton, and to talk about pricing, I appreciate the simplicity of your question, and I may somewhat frustrate you because, you know, as you know in following our business, it tends to be fairly complex, right? There are changes year over year as you think about the mix of our business in top markets or certain geographies which are going to carry higher average pricing. We've obviously been growing.

Erin BrewerVery significantly in low-scale markets. So you've got some of that mix effect, which, um, which makes it probably not straightforward to give you the, the best answer. I, I would offer a couple of perspectives though. I think if you look over a number of years, this industry generally does see some amount of price increases. If you think about longer-term trends over years, maybe over the near term, you know, what I can tell you is sequentially from Q4 to Q1 pretty stable overall. A couple of questions ago, one of the things I was trying to highlight is you think about our overall gross bookings and kind of the mix of that. It has evolved. It has evolved over time. So we've, you know, we've talked about the significant growth of higher-value modes in that mix, the addition of Free Now. We further talked about things like, you know, ads or our chauffeuring business. Which contribute to gross bookings, have been growing obviously nicely, but don't carry the same rides component.

Erin BrewerSo those are some of the areas, you know, sequentially I would say overall pricing pretty stable as we think about Q4 to Q1. So hopefully that's some helpful color.

Michael MortonThank you.

OperatorUp next, we have Ken Gawrelski with Wells Fargo.

Ken GawrelskiThank you. Can you hear me okay?

OperatorYes.

Ken GawrelskiAll right.

Erin BrewerThank you.

Ken GawrelskiCan you maybe— can you help me a little bit strategically understand? You've made several acquisitions, some in the kind of— some are geographic diversification, but others, you know, just— it's not strictly in the rideshare business. Could you talk a little bit about how you see them all coming together strategically?

Ken GawrelskiWhat are the key points of synergy? What beyond geographic expansion to those assets, why are they better together? Maybe I would just put it that way simply.

David RisherYeah. Let me take a stab at that. And maybe a little, just tiny bit of history, I guess. So we were not a particularly acquisitive company for a period of time. And I think there's a pretty obvious reason for why. It's because we were kind of just getting our base business going strong. Last year, we made our first significant acquisition, at least as long as I've been here, with FreeNow. That was definitely a rideshare acquisition. Of course, it's a taxi-focused kind of core rather than what's called PHV in Europe. But it expanded our footprint, which is nice for geographic diversity into 9 new countries, and allowed us, in that case in particular, strategically also to build upon the government relations that a company that's been in the taxi business has had to have had for a long time, which is going to be so important for AVs. So I would look at much of our acquisition activity in Europe as important for geographic kind of diversity, but also for an AV future.

David RisherYou can see that with Gett as well, which just closed last week— or this week, actually. Gett is a, you know, well-respected largely B2B taxi service in London. As we mentioned in the prepared remarks, between that and the FreeNow presence in London, we're on something north of 70%, maybe 80%, something like this of the taxis that have apps in their cars now have a Lyft app in the car. So that's amazing because that allows us, obviously, access to a very, very important market, Europe's biggest rideshare market, arguably one of the most interesting and important in the world. And again, if you think of our activity in London, there's a short-term issue there of kind of wanting to build volume in part because that's part of what we bring to the AV category, as well as government relations. Again, Gett actually directly works with governments, and then we've got good relations through FreeNow. So I would say those are sort of the things.

David RisherNow, TBR is the other acquisition that we've announced recently, also in the rideshare space, but quite different. That's really a chauffeur space, very, very high end. And I think that speaks to— So we talk about this as up and out. Out is kind of the overseas piece and up is how can we strengthen our position in kind of higher-end offerings. And it's wonderful to have a very, very top tier, perhaps you may know TBR, as often they kind of service non-deal roadshows in the United States and abroad, 120 countries. You know, once you have a service level that is sort of marked at, you know, a 10 out of 10, that frankly brings your whole company up. And so many companies, of course, are now making, you know, good money in the, in the high end. So I think that's maybe the— that touches on the significant ones.

Erin BrewerThank you.

OperatorOkay, next, next question is going to be from Ross Sandler with Barclays.

Ross SandlerGreat. So this is a good follow-on from that last answer. Can we just get an update on whether the FreeNow kind of like-for-like is growing? I think it was like flattish when you guys made that acquisition. I know we have an anniversary date, but is the business growing and are there any like early proof points of U.S. Lyft enthusiasts going to Europe and, you know, kind of, you know, whatever, adding to the FreeNow business that way? Any color there? Thank you.

Erin BrewerSo I'll start with the performance. Then, David, do you want to talk about what we've got coming up on the rider side? So, Ross Sandler, to answer your question directly, yes. The business is growing. You know, we talked about when we bought the business having about a billion-dollar overall annual run rate. That— we talked about that being on track as we closed last year. We are out— we anticipate growth as we look into 2026.

David RisherAnd on the second part there, we've just begun, but maybe I can give you kind of the arc of the, of the project. So today what happens, um, you know, very directly, if you're a Lyft user and you open FreeNow app in London, you'll get a notification saying— if you open up the Lyft app, I'm sorry, you'll get a notification saying, you know, our partner FreeNow is delivering rides here in Europe. And so, you know, it's a fairly kind of basic integration, you know, just like that. And we do some other small things as well with Chase and some other things. Our vision for sure, and we can say now really by 2027, is that anywhere as a as a rider on the, on the Lyft app, the sort of Lyft ecosystem, um, you know, anywhere you are with that app and that we do business through FreeNow or, or others, you'll be able to open that app and be able to get a ride anywhere you want. So it'll be a much, much more tightly integrated, uh, experience.

David RisherThat's happening over, uh, you know, in, in 2027. And that's always been kind of the plan started, is step-by-step integration such that by 2027 we're able to, to debut that. Um, once that happens, of course, then you would expect the business growth in the business to be much more significant as a result of that work.

OperatorOkay, great. Next question is Chad Larkin with Oppenheimer.

Chad LarkinHey, thanks. Could you maybe talk about the margin benefits of some of these higher-value rides as they become a larger share of overall rides and, and as well as like as taxi expansion into more cities. Thank you.

Erin BrewerSure, I'll take the margin profile. David, do you want to talk about taxi, taxi expansion overall? So absolutely. As you think about the higher, higher value mode mix of rides all the way up to and including TBR and chauffeuring that David was just describing, they absolutely bring a higher overall margin profile to the business. So the mix is not only helpful financially, but also gives riders a lot greater choice. And what we're seeing is when we— when those are offered up, you know, we're definitely seeing behavior where that trade-up will happen. And so it's both satisfying rider needs and desires at that point in time, Um, but also obviously increasing that mix is bringing in, um, a healthier margin profile.

David RisherYeah, and I'm going to give a shout out to the, the, our Lyft Black in particular, and then, and then zoom back out. It's actually our highest rated, uh, ride mode, highest rated ride mode. So it's a, it is a great product. It's been a little bit undermarketed over the years, but as I say, we've both improved the quality of it, and you're starting to see maybe a little more uptake. Uh, if you're on the call and you haven't taken it, I highly recommend, and go ahead and pay with your United miles. Okay. So, and then the taxis, you know, one of our strategic priorities this year, we talk about our internal, um, kind of our internal framework for it, is expanding the platform. And, uh, you know, you've seen, uh, some experiments we've done in a kind of small scale in St. Louis, then I would say much more significant scale in LA. There'll be other cities beyond that. Uh, it's great because taxis carry their own insurance, so that's got sort of an interesting, uh, slightly different financial profile, um, than the, you know, typical rideshare, that's wonderful.

David RisherAnd then of course, taxis in Europe are a whole different thing, right? It's a much higher-end product, a very predictable product in many countries, and has also higher bookings per ride typically, just because of, again, that combination of regulation. And it's, it's seen as a little bit more of a luxury product than here in the US. So, um, yeah, when you look across our whole platform, it's, it's, um, I feel really good about our kind of building out a very strong foundation, um, that then ultimately of course will embrace AVs as well. And that's, uh, that's next to come.

OperatorGreat. Next question will be Justin with KeyBank.

Miles JakubiakGreat. Thank you. This is Miles Jakubiak on for Justin. I wanted to ask about loyalty. I was wondering if you could just provide an update. I know it's pretty early on Lyft Cash Rewards and then maybe just a broader view. You know, you mentioned wanting to do more in loyalty. So how that fits in with the strategy and then, you know, along with Lyft Pink and your existing offering there. And then maybe just, you know, continuing on international expansion, you know, been pretty active in M&A and new geographies, obviously. But do you think, you know, this puts you in a position where you can start organically entering new markets now that you have more of a portfolio in places like Europe to bolster that expansion? Thank you.

David RisherI'm sure, Miles Jakubiak, why don't I start with that one, and then, um, and we'll see if Erin has anything to add, or maybe not on this one. Um, so, um, oh wait, I just totally spaced on your question. My apologies.

Erin BrewerLoyalty.

David RisherLoyalty. Yeah, of course, of course. Okay, so right, um, so yeah, loyalty. So we've made some real inroads in loyalty. This is an area, again, of the company where maybe we've been a little bit kind of silent because we've been getting things together behind the scenes. Um, but here's what's happened. So in the last— I think it was last August— we really started to lean into loyalty for our business riders. So this is a really interesting program. So, so we have not really had a good business, uh, product for some period of time when it came to a loyalty product, and, uh, and this was causing us some pain in the marketplace. And so, uh, what we did is we said, well, let's come out with the best program that there is for rideshare, full stop, full stop. And so here it is, super clear. It's free, okay, that's very important, and it's 6% back up to 8% back depending on your mode. And then you also get points multipliers for United and Hilton and Alaska, if I'm not mistaken.

David RisherAnd that's great. I'm going to say the free part one more time because it's quite important. We have a competitor out there that sells something else, and internally we sometimes talk about it as selling a time bomb. I hate to say it that way, but you sell something for free and then a couple of months later it starts to charge you. So we don't have that. We have a product that's a free product that gives you immediate rewards back for what we call our managed business rewards program. We've learned a ton there. It's been, you know, quite successful. I'm going to forget the exact statistic, but it's significant. Maybe I can kind of find it as I'm talking here, but it's been significant. It's grown very significantly and has some kind of interesting characteristics about how many more rides people take once they start to sign up. So that's kind of been the basis of it. And you also mentioned Lyft Cash Rewards as something we're experimenting with on the consumer side.

David RisherSuper cool, still relatively small because it's definitely in experimentation mode. But what I think you can see is we're starting to put some energy in this area. And, you know, this is a bit of a stay tuned story, but something that we've got some good stuff to talk about in the future.

Erin BrewerMaybe I can add in some, some of the stats on Business Rewards overall. So, you know, if we think about sort of first-time rides on rewards-eligible Business Profiles, that grew 59% year over year. And those rewards-eligible riders are taking 25% more Lyft rides per month. So we're super excited about what we're seeing kind of in these early phases. You know, that tells us a lot about that. We've got a great part, a great product overall that people are finding value in it. They're taking more airport trips. So a little bit more on the stats.

David RisherAwesome.

David RisherAnd then I think you had a question, I know, about kind of organic expansion, maybe in new markets internationally. I think that's probably one we're not going to talk too much about.

Erin BrewerOkay.

OperatorNext question, we have Shweta Khajuria with Wolfe Research.

Shweta KhajuriaThank you for taking my question. Two quick ones for me, please. First, I'm sorry if I missed it, but did you quantify the impact of the fuel program on your P&L? If not, could we please get a sense of the impact? And then the second is how should we think about the partnership rides growth? So the 27% data point is great. Any sense on how that cohort of 27% of the rides, what that growth is versus the non-partnership rides, how does that compare? Thank you.

Erin BrewerShweta Khajuria, I'll, I'll take the fuel question and then turn it over to David. So we talked in our prepared remarks and on this call, we're really proud just generally all the time about the way that we engage with our drivers, about the continued preference that they demonstrate for our platform. And I think that's important because we're super proud to have been really first out there with a relief program. I think it says a lot about who we are as a company overall. And what we did in this overall program is really take the approach of leaning in with our partners. We've got a great driver rewards program overall. It offers all kinds of benefits to partners. And so leaning in with our partners to provide relief here in terms of, you know, drivers can get almost a dollar in savings across all the programs that's really co-funded overall. If you think about the way that, that those benefits accrue. So while, while all of this is, is meaningful to drivers, certainly, and material to them, it's not material to our overall financial profile, nor do we expect it to be in the second quarter.

David RisherAnd then on the partnership side, um, there's not too much more I can say, but maybe just give a little bit of color. Uh, you know, maybe two, two ways to think about— one is like different partners do provide different types of, um, benefits to us as a, as a business. On average, partners tend to be quite strong at bringing higher bookings type rides on average. United, you can absolutely probably imagine why that would be true. Same with Alaska, same with Hilton, same with Chase. And sometimes it's quite significant. So it's a new set of rider or a set of riders who are taking typically higher priced rides, which tend to have higher margins, and people tend to be quite loyal to those programs, and therefore they take rides quite regularly. Then you have maybe more of a volume strategy with DoorDash. DoorDash is kind of the— you might think of it as the volume anchor because it's got such a large program, but it also— DashPass, but also, as I mentioned, people eat quite a lot.

David RisherAnd so therefore, that's an important piece of the puzzle.

David RisherSo overall, as a portfolio, it tends to be quite a healthy part of our rider portfolio. So that just kind of gives you a sense of how we think about it. Different— have different characteristics, but on average, really quite, quite nice, typically on the booking side and frequency side. Okay.

Shweta KhajuriaThank you both.

OperatorSure. And the last question is going to be with Rohit Kulkarni from Roth Capital.

Erin BrewerDid we lose you?

Rohit KulkarniHey, can you hear me now? Uh, it said unmute. I hope you can hear me. Okay. Um, I had two questions, one on pricing and one on AVs. Um, you talk about this Check Lyft messaging campaign. Um, are you seeing any kind of measurable changes in rider behavior since you launched it? Uh, perhaps improved conversion from price-sensitive shoppers. And kind of, if you think it becomes a normalized kind of consumer behavior, is there a scenario that could lead to more structural pressure on industry pricing over time? Or perhaps there is more pricing power that both companies have? That's just first question. And second, on AV's It feels like the 3 cities closer to launch— Nashville, Hamburg, London— and can you just level set how are you operating in or offering your services, be it the orchestration layer, fleet operations, depot management? Perhaps talk through your capabilities across those 3 places.

David RisherSure, Rohit Kulkarni, I'll take this. And it's a— these are big last questions, but let's do it. Let's do it. Okay. Yeah, no, no problem at all. So, okay, on pricing, let's talk about that for a second. So here's— so, okay, you asked about sort of results and then maybe kind of the implications on the future. The results right now are great, promising, but it's still very early. These are quite— it's quite an early campaign. You'll see us turn up the volume there, which is probably a good indication that we like what we see so far. This is a very, very price competitive— already a very, very competitive marketplace. I don't think either company truthfully has a lot of room on the price side because if we did, we would have done it. We do it every day. Another way to say would be 3 million times a day, we try to offer the best price we possibly can. As Erin says, reliable competitive pricing is our strategy. So that is maybe not something I worry so much about.

David RisherWhat I do think is true is customers who check both apps tend to do better. And there's that study out there that says in New York, they'd save $170. It's just true. The more people who check both, I think the healthier the marketplace gets, keeps us both on our toes. So that's the way we think about it. Obviously, our position is a nice one to be in because we offer a very competitive product, fast ETAs, in many cases faster than the competition, good pricing, in many cases less expensive, although clearly not always, uh, the competition. And so if more people check us out, then we can, you know, start to impress them with the quality of our service and so forth and so on. And now I can talk all about driver cancellation, how we've done a great job there, and pickup times and so forth. So it kind of tends to be very nice reinforcement once we— people— once people get into our, um, our place. Yeah, I'm going to turn it over to Erin, and then we'll come back on AVs.

Erin BrewerYeah, maybe before you dive into AVs, Rohit Kulkarni, I think something interesting to point out— David mentioned early days, you know, this campaign has been live in San Francisco and New York. These are two cities that also have a pretty heavy mix of premium modes. So in your question was the implication of sort of price-sensitive riders, and hopefully what you gathered from David's answer, but I think it's really important in our observation in these early cities, is that's not really the thing, right? The thing is just, hey, check, as opposed to doing something maybe out of habit. Just check. So, you know, I just wanted to clarify that.

David RisherAbsolutely right. Super appreciated. And by the way, everybody likes a deal. Everybody likes a deal. So, uh, yeah, and we see that up and down on AVs. Okay, so you mentioned a couple of areas where we're— a couple of cities that we've talked specifically about. Let's give you a quick update on each. Um, maybe start with, uh, Nashville, then go to London, then go to Hamburg. So in Nashville, um, it's actually quite exciting. You see Waymo's on the road right now. Uh, later this summer we start to take over operations of that. Then we open up our whole, you know, kind of new center, this 80,000-square-foot center., and then you'll be able to actually order a, you know, a Waymo on the Lyft app, you know, in our hybrid marketplace there, which is really something we're very, very excited about. It's going great. You know, it— how can I characterize it? I guess what I would say there is, you know, we've been in a very nice position for the last 10 years.

David RisherWe've about 50,000 cars that we've had to manage through our FlexDrive subsidiary. Those 50,000 cars have driven, you know, literally billions of miles, billions of miles. And that has required an enormous amount of expertise, or that has delivered to us enormous amount of expertise on maintenance and availability and so forth. And we think we're industry-leading on the operation side. So when you look at the partner we have in this case, Waymo, probably the world's— no, not probably, inarguably the world's leader in AV tech. And then you marry that with what we believe is the world's leader in fleet operations and efficient fleet operations, low-cost fleet operations. We really are very excited about what we see there. So that's kind of where Nashville is, and over the summer you'll see that grow pretty quickly. Okay, in London, it's a different situation. London, our partner is Baidu. Baidu, arguably the second sort of most advanced technology out there, certainly in terms of driver miles driven and so forth and so on.

David RisherI was actually just in China a couple weeks ago meeting with them, incredible company. Their RT6 cars have just rolled off literally the docks. The same ones I was riding in, in Beijing are now in London. They're beginning mapping streets. It'll take a while there. It takes a while when you add a new technology to city streets. There are regulators that you have to work with, and we're spending a lot of energy working with regulators on issues like data privacy, for example. Very, very important, but I'm super proud of our team.. And they've made incredible progress there. And then there's just the physics of the thing. You know, and just as a quick story, in London, a lot of small streets that are two-way and sort of how do you navigate, you know, two-way street with AVs where you can't, you know, signal each other, you go first, you go first. So these things take time, but we've got an ODD that's beginning to get mapped out and we're sort of beginning there.

David RisherSo a little bit earlier in the process just because it's a, yeah, but at the same time, very much on track. And then Hamburg, that's a different thing. Hamburg is really just, we've established a partnership with the city level saying that we're gonna be the AV provider there. We haven't given too much more detail on it. I won't do so today, but it just gives you a sense that, you know, things are going to roll out both in the US and Europe, you know, in a number of different ways. So that's kind of where things stand.

David RisherOkay. Okay. Listen, I think I'm getting the wrap-up. So yeah, you're so welcome. Thank you, Rohit Kulkarni. And thank you all. Really appreciate your joining the call today. Of course, looking ahead, super excited about another strong year coming up as we continue to track towards our 2027 targets. Thanks for coming along on the ride with us. You take care and we'll see you next time.