Lyft CEO David Risher Talks Fourth-Quarter Results

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Okay, shares of lifted down around fifteen percent, on track for the biggest drop since August of twenty twenty four. This stock's under pressure, but in the company's earnings, the company kind of set out on working on a global expansion and new product offerings.

Lift.

CEO David Risher is here with us in San Francisco. I want to go to the core business because you know, I'm going to get to Roba Taxi shortly. But you know, like the things that are good for you are black Chaufford rides, airports, those are higher value and so like my interpretation of reading all the analyst response at least is that they looked at the kind of profit outlook and said, that's a bit below what we expected. What

I mean, it's such a good question, right, Look, we had a blowout quarter, so record bookings, accelerating, record profits, never been higher, record cash flow, record customers. Okay, So all that is really good, and what it shows is the customer obsession is what drives profitable growth.

Now there's no question it sounds.

Like analysts are looking at things like margin, But as you just pointed out, a lot of our biggest growth is actually in the highest value mode, it's highest margin modes. So we've got a lot of conviction that we're in a good place and only getting better.

You and I spent some time together at the end of last year and we went kind of a bit deeper on the robotape plan. Yeah, it's through partnerships and it's leveraging what you believe is a strength in fleet management. That's right, succinctly update us on everything that's due to happen.

Then please, oh my good.

I mean, this is gonna be a big year for self driving cars, right, and let's start with sort of the big picture. When self driving cars come on to a network like cars, it tends to expand the market. And you would expect that because it's a cool new product. It's reliable. You know, you can kind of space out, you can text and not worry about a driver or over hearing a phone call something like that.

So that's really good.

Okay, So then what happens is you've got to make sure that you're well positioned with all the best players in the market if you're on in our in our business, we are. We've got way more partnership as you know. We've got a buy Do partner that we've just announced is going to be live in London later this year. We just worked out an agreement with the city of Hamburg in Germany to be the first robotaxi provider there.

We think we're the.

Best in class, and our goal is to be maybe five percent cheaper than any other place with higher quality, to put robo taxes on the network.

Cheaper that doesn't immediately make me think profit driving David in that way, And so like talk about your targets. You've got this one billion EMIT deal by twenty twenty seven, and Lumberg Intelligence is warring.

That looks pretty ambitious at this stage.

Well, so when I say cheaper, I mean the lowest cost way right. And that's the thing is, I want our cost position to be really good. To your point, like our goals which we set out a couple of years ago. Our top line growth of twenty of fifteen percent mid teens year on year, much on track for that, and bottom line growth getting to a billion dollars of adjusted EBITDAT which will be four percent margin.

Very much on track for that.

But what it means is you've got to be really smart about managing your costs. You've got really good about kind of managing your quality, and we're doing really well on both. We've just made progress. As I say, we've got our best profitable, highest profitable quarter.

Just this pass you for I think, therefore, go back to the av world because there is this ongoing anxiety that the competition is just going to get so fierce.

Are you set up to win?

What are you saying to convince the investor base they shouldn't be setting off your shares like this?

Yeah, I think that the way to think about avs is they're going to be good for the whole industry, the ride share industry, because as they say, it's a good new product at a lower cost. And I think why we are particularly well positioned is we have demand that runs to the two three four million people a day level, So we have lots of demand for this, and you know what they want. They want a fast, reliable pick up. It's going to get them where they want to go. Sometimes they'll want to be driven by

Is there a case study for you to reflect on in real terms?

Then?

Like Atlanta, mame mobility? What are you learning there?

Yeah?

And by the way, what's the status of it in terms of like fully driver lists, et cetera.

Yeah, for sure.

So we're in Atlanta, have we still have safety drivers in the car just to make sure everything is going well, and you know, because we want this to be an incredibly high quality, incredibly safe experience.

What we're learning is people love it. I mean, this is the interesting thing.

People before they when they hear about av's are often a little skeptical. They sound like, I'm not sure I'm going to be excited about taking a car that's driven by a robot. You know, five minutes later they've kind of fallen in love.

And that cialization is highlight. What's the metric? Yeah, super high, super high.

Basically, I mean as much supply as we can get we can put on the road, because there's plenty of demand for these things. I think if you want to look at a case study for broadly speaking, maybe look at the transition from DVDs to streaming. Right, it's a similar sort of technology shift. And look how big streaming is today compared to DVDs in the past.

It's going to be that kind of wave, Stevin. You know what else?

I love a lot of New Yorkers love the bikes, and boy has this snow made things really difficult. Hate to get personal hit, but I mean, look at these pictures. I am really struggling to get my bike out. I'm really struggling to get it back in. How much of a hit is this to have to refund customers? How much are you thinking about what the city and you can work together with to make this a really costly business for you in these sorts of temperatures.

Yeah, I mean, look, this has been a big big learning for us. Obviously there's a huge snowstorm. I'm told that we're about seventy five percent dugout right now, which is amazing, but that takes a lot of work, a lot of just physical labor to make sure that the bag stations are available. I think people have taken something like half a million rides in the last couple of days,

I asked Bloomberg Tech producer Justin Now to pop his head out the window and check, because like here in the bay, obviously we don't get confronted by snow. But you know, I went back and read my history about the kind of micro mobility part of the business. It is a smaller part on revenue spasis, but clearly it's still important to you.

It is how important?

Yeah, I mean, look, as you say, financially it's relatively small, but this is the future.

Look, when you talk about avs, that's part of the future. When you talk about micromobility, people.

Once people get on an e bikes, I say this sometimes it's kind of like meeting a person who's just started pickleball, Like they have to tell you about it, how amazing this thing is. Same with e bikes, you know what I mean. So it's like, so this is sometimes you can see the future and if you look out three, five, ten years, you're going to see more