Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Uber said it had its “strongest quarter ever” on Wednesday, raising investor hopes for 2025 as executives talked up the ride-hailing group’s efforts in the increasingly competitive market around autonomous vehicles.The San Francisco-based company showed continued growth in the fourth quarter. Gross bookings — a measure of customers’ total spending across all its business units — hit a record $44.2bn, topping analysts’ expectations of $43.5bn.The group’s 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 “more confident than ever that Uber is uniquely positioned to capture the $1tn plus opportunity” tied to autonomous vehicles.Ahead of earnings, Uber said it would begin rolling out services offered by Waymo, Alphabet’s 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’s driver-focused business model.Analysts at Bank of America said the impact was “likely overdone” and that there would be “better visibility into the lengthy timeline” 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.“I think for the next 10 years you’re going to have hybrid networks of humans and machines,” he said at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “Ten years from now, things may be different.”Uber 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 — which in January hit a 26-month high against a basket of trading partners’ currencies — could provide a challenge for the company.Uber said its first-quarter bookings outlook would have been “nearly $1bn higher” if it had been based on the previous quarter’s foreign exchange rates.
