Skift Take
Uber only sees a fraction of the $6 billion that runs through its apps, but it's a significant sign of the activity it facilitates (and takes a cut of, too).
— Jason Clampet
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is clearly excited about his restaurant delivery service Uber Eats.
“Eats,” he said yesterday at Recode’s Code Conference in Southern California, “is an exploding business in a good way.”
Khosrowshahi told the Code audience that Uber Eats saw $6 billion in bookings over the last year. Uber as a whole did $36.2B in bookings for 2017, according to the Wall Street Journal. That means Uber Eats is around 16 percent of total bookings. Uber is still a privately held company, so numbers should be unverified. For comparison, rival Grubhub did $3.7 billion in bookings in 2017.
In addition to the large volume of bookings Uber Eats is seeing, Khosrowshahi made additional claims about size and growth. “We are going to be the largest food delivery business in the world,” he said, before quickly adding that is only true if you don’t include China in the equation. Meituan Dianping currently dominates the crowded Chinese market.
Since taking over as CEO in August 2017, Khosrowshahi has focused on fixing Uber’s terrible reputation, but the delivery business has managed to grow. According to him, it is “growing over 200 percent” this year, and is now operating in 250 cities (Uber the car service is in 600). While it has attempted to differentiate the two brands through messaging and new branding, the delivery service does lean on the rest of the company. “We created a startup within the company that can use all of our local infrastructure in all of the cities that we’re in,” Khosrowshahi said.
You can watch the full interview above.
