Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Uber said it had its \u201cstrongest quarter ever\u201d on Wednesday, raising investor hopes for 2025 as executives talked up the ride-hailing group\u2019s efforts in the increasingly competitive market around autonomous vehicles.The San Francisco-based company showed continued growth in the fourth quarter. Gross bookings \u2014 a measure of customers\u2019 total spending across all its business units \u2014 hit a record $44.2bn, topping analysts\u2019 expectations of $43.5bn.The group\u2019s operating profit rose 18 per cent from a year ago to $770mn in the three months ended December 31, but had been weighed down by an undisclosed $462mn legal settlement reserve, about which the company declined to provide details. Uber reported its first annual operating profit in 2023 and repeated the feat in 2024 with a $2.8bn figure.Chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi said Uber achieved record highs for trips taken, gross bookings and adjusted earnings in the fourth quarter, and said he was \u201cmore confident than ever that Uber is uniquely positioned to capture the $1tn plus opportunity\u201d tied to autonomous vehicles.Ahead of earnings, Uber said it would begin rolling out services offered by Waymo, Alphabet\u2019s self-driving taxi subsidiary, in Austin, Texas, with customers charged the same price as a human-driven vehicle. The companies had struck the deal in September.However, the ride-hailing company will face stiff competition from Tesla, which will begin trialling its autonomous Cybercabs in Austin in June.A year ago, Uber sought to step up returns to shareholders and announced an inaugural $7bn share buyback programme, but its stock fell 2 per cent in 2024 as investors fretted that autonomous vehicles would undercut the company\u2019s driver-focused business model.Analysts at Bank of America said the impact was \u201clikely overdone\u201d and that there would be \u201cbetter visibility into the lengthy timeline\u201d of adoption this year.Khosrowshahi said last month that he did not expect autonomous vehicles to displace human drivers for more than a decade and that Uber was open to working with Tesla as the electric-vehicle maker ventures into the realm of taxis.\u201cI think for the next 10 years you\u2019re going to have hybrid networks of humans and machines,\u201d he said at the World Economic Forum in Davos. \u201cTen years from now, things may be different.\u201dUber said it expected gross bookings of between $42bn and $43.5bn in the current quarter, compared with $43.5bn forecast by analysts, according to Visible Alpha data.A strong US dollar \u2014 which in January hit a 26-month high against a basket of trading partners\u2019 currencies \u2014 could provide a challenge for the company.Uber said its first-quarter bookings outlook would have been \u201cnearly $1bn higher\u201d if it had been based on the previous quarter\u2019s foreign exchange rates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Uber said it had its \u201cstrongest quarter ever\u201d on Wednesday, raising investor hopes for 2025 as executives talked up the ride-hailing group\u2019s efforts in the increasingly<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-194179","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194179\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}