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The core business is doing everything right. Bookings have grown over 20% YoY for four straight quarters, EBITDA is up 33% YoY, margins keep expanding, and membership plus cross-platform engagement are both at all-time highs. Management is even guiding toward reaccelerating buybacks. Yet the stock is stuck trading at just 12-15x forward earnings , a discount that has nothing to do with the fundamentals and everything to do with the market still waiting for clarity on the AV transition.
I believe that the AV overhang is overstated. Look at the most mature robotaxi markets, LA, SF, Phoenix , and Uber's own category share is actually rising, not falling. That's the opposite of what you'd expect if AV were about to eat their lunch. My read is that Uber ends up being the AV commercialization and demand-aggregation layer, not the company that gets disrupted by it. They're not betting on one AV horse either , the partnership roster keeps growing (Waymo, Nvidia, Rivian, WeRide, and now [Pony.ai](http://Pony.ai) for Europe), which tells me they're building themselves into the platform every AV operator needs to actually reach riders, regardless of who wins the underlying tech race.
There's also optionality here that I don't think is priced in at all: Uber for Business, advertising, grocery/retail delivery, and the pending Delivery Hero stake.
The relative valuation is what really makes this compelling to me. Uber does 8x the revenue of Lyft, the #2 player, and yet it trades at a steep discount , 23x '26 earnings, 17x '27 earnings. Breaking it down: \~55% of revenue is ride-hailing, \~35% is Uber Eats, \~10% is freight. DoorDash trades at 31x '27 earnings. If I value Uber Eats anywhere close to DoorDash's multiple, that implies Uber's ride-hailing business alone is trading at way less than 17x earnings , materially cheaper than Lyft's 31x, for a company that's bigger, more diversified, and gaining share in the exact markets where AV is supposedly the biggest threat. That mismatch is the crux of the thesis: the market is punishing Uber's strongest segment like it's the one at risk, while paying up for a smaller single-line competitor.