Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news shares of Lyft.
Let's check in on them because the company reported earnings after the bell yesterday, including record number of rides completed. We're currently up three and a half percent. Lift CEO David Richard joins us to talk us through the results. That for some there was a bit of something for everyone. The revenue number behave perhaps a little bit shy of expectations. But the sheer number of people riding with you at a record what's driving that?
David, Yeah, I mean I love that fact, the number of the sheer number of people riding with us, because it shows that we're doing something right.
Right.
So I've been saying for a long time customer obsession drives profitable growth. We're now profitable. We're growing, you know, as is our ninth consecutive quarter of double digit growth. And in terms of customer adoption, you know, we've we've never had more riders and drivers on the platform. So you know what's driving it. It's innovations like Lift Silver,
It's partnerships like our Door Down partnership. We just announced a new partnership with the United A lot of the sort of ecosystem work we're doing is really helping us grow faster than ever.
And let's talk about partnerships when it comes to autonomous because that's where the future that the puck is moving. How are you ensuring that you're moving with it and taking on what seems to be future competition coming from I don't know, the likes of Weymo, but also even a Tesla.
Yeah, you know what, I don't think of it as future competition. I mean, of course there'll be competitive skirmishes, but big picture, as self driving cars come onto our platform, it's going to expand the marketplace. And we can see that already even in the cities where self driving cars are operating in the US right now, we're seeing something like five x the growth of cities where they're not operating. So because what they're safe, they're interesting, they're kind of
you know, they're novel, they're reliable. In terms of partnerships, we have a couple of great partnerships. We have one with main Mobility, which launches officially this summer in Atlanta, so you can take a self driving car if you live in Atlanta starting in a little over a month, we hope, and then big picture. We just signed a big agreement with Baidu, who is one of the world's large just probably the world's largest self driving car company,
to expand into Europe, into couple countries in Europe. So a lot of action going on the self driving world. Obviously still very early, but we see, you know, huge opportunity for us in the future.
Yeah, Plan Germany UK twenty twenty six, David, with regulatory approvals. Speak to that international growth that you've really brought to bear of late. How much is that a winning formula for revenue for profitability?
Yeah, for both, I think, and actually for resilience too. You know, one of the things that I've seen over the last two and a half year since I've been in this job is being so focused on North America has been great because it's allowed us to really innovate and drive the industry forward. But now that we're in a very strong position, we can afford to and frankly, you know, sort of our customers want us to be a more global company. So we just acquired a company
called free Now in Europe. It's a taxi focused aggregator. You know, the taxis in Europe, of course, you know this well, are sort of a high end product than people might think in the United States, and so it
will allow us to have a footprint across Europe. Then, when we tie up back to your earlier question about self driving, as self driving comes to Europe and Europe is a little bit behind the United States, the relationship that we now have with regulators and of course with millions of customers is really going to help us form a platform that we can build on to bring self driving cars to the UK and Germany and hopefully beyond.
Okay, So when you're leaning into some of these expansions more broadly, will there be more m and A to play here? You've already done it in Europe. I know you've got to integrate, but would you look further afield too.
Maybe, you know, you never say never about this sort of thing, you know, I think we're in a very strong position now to do this kind of work. But as you say, the first order business for us is that integration work. And we just closed the free Now deal last week. I was actually in Barcelona the week before with a team there. They're so excited to get started and already now, if you open the free now app in Europe, you'll get a prompt that says, you know,
we're a partnership with Lyft and and vice versa. If you open the lift app in Europe, maybe more importantly, you'll be directed to go over to free. Now we're just beginning that integration. I think there's a lot more work to do there before we really think about additional acquisitions.
And David, you've got such sort of a bird's eye perspective on the consumer. Really at this moment, how resilient is that consumer, particularly here in the US people trying to read the tea.
Least I understand. You know, every single day people sort of look deep in the teacup and try to figure out what's going on. All I can say is, if you're looking for weakness, look elsewhere. We're not seeing it. We're seeing record rides, you know, double digit growth, even airports, which people often look at as sort of a leading indicator.
Now it's true, I think TSA volumes are moderating a little bit, but we're growing faster than TSA volumes are and we've grown airports now quarter over quarter and year over years. So it's such an interesting thing. I know people are sort of desperate to find, you know, sort of the cloud and the silver lining, but at least from our perspective, we're not seeing it.
If CEO David Risher, great to have you back on the show, Stay well, Thank you.