管理層發言
Good afternoon, and welcome to the Lyft Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2024 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode to prevent any background noise. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session, and instructions will be given at that time. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Aurelien Nolf, Vice President, FP&A and Investor Relations. You may begin.
Thank you. Welcome to the Lyft Earnings Call for the Fourth Quarter and Full Year of 2024. On the call today, we have our CEO, David Risher, and our CFO, Erin Brewer. We'll make forward-looking statements on today's call relating to our business strategy and performance, partnerships, future financial and operating results, trends in our marketplace, and guidance. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those projected or implied during this call. These factors and risks are described in our earnings materials in our recent SEC filings. All of the forward-looking statements that we make on today's call are based on our beliefs as of today, and we disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. Additionally, today we are going to discuss customers. For rideshare, there are two customers in every car.
The driver is a Lyft customer and the rider is the driver's customer. We care about both. Our discussion today will also include non-GAAP financial measures, which are not a substitute for our GAAP results. Reconciliations of our historical GAAP to non-GAAP results can be found in our earnings materials, which are available on our IR website. Lastly, the team will be in Boston, San Francisco, New York, and Toronto over the next few weeks, so please do reach out to me if you would like to connect with us. And with that, I'll pass the call to David.
Thank you, Aurelien. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. 2024 was an incredible year of reinvention and industry leadership for Lyft. We executed spectacularly and we're in our strongest position ever. I am proud to share that we've reached all-time highs in rides, in riders, in driver hours, and even made our service levels industry-leading. As a consequence, our market share at the end of January this year was the highest it's been since 2022 and our financial results are the best ever. It proves our thesis, customer recession has driven profitable growth. Drivers are choosing Lyft at record rates. In Q4, we had the highest number of driver hours than in any quarter in Lyft history, thanks in part to improved driver retention and improvements to their earnings. Drivers collectively earned nearly $9 billion in 2024, the highest amount of combined driver earnings on our platform ever, and benefited from innovations like our 70% earnings commitment.
In Q4, we also had a record number of active riders. A series of technical breakthroughs from our marketplace team meant that in Q4, on average, riders were picked up almost one minute faster than the year before, and our average ETAs became the fastest in the industry. I want to repeat that. Lyft’s average ETA in Q4 was faster than both our big legacy competitor and newer entrants. That's a massive accomplishment and underscores our commitment to offering the best service in the industry. Another rider win we're proud of is our continued improvement in price reliability, thanks to reductions in surge pricing, which we call Primetime. We brought Primetime down significantly in 2024, even faster than we had planned, which is great for riders. This translates into real savings. In total, riders saved more than $400 million in 2024 as a result of lower Primetime, and we're not done. We view Primetime as a bug in the rideshare system.
Last year, we introduced Price Lock, a feature where riders can pay a small fee to lock in the price of their regular rides. Since launching last fall, we're seeing approximately 70% of Price Lock riders continue to purchase passes month after month, many of whom are high-frequency riders who are now loyal to Lyft because of this feature. Last week, we announced Price Lock around the clock and allowed riders to pause it whenever they wanted. It just keeps getting better. Between launching and improving products like Price Lock and our on-time pickup promise, expanding our highly requested Women+ Connect feature, which has now supported over 50 million rides, and launching our driver earnings commitment, 2024 was the year of innovation like never before. This is customer obsession at work and it's paying dividends. In a Q4 survey, driver preference for Lyft was 16 percentage points higher than our largest rideshare competitor, up from 12 the prior quarter.
Looking at our financial performance, Erin will get into the details, but our work in 2024 resulted in extraordinary milestones, including our first-ever year of GAAP profitability and the first full year of positive free cash flow. All of this just in the initial year of our multi-year plan. When we obsess over customers, Lyft grows profitably, simple as that. Now on to 2025. Our goal is to set a new standard of service for the industry. For drivers, we're turning our attention to recognizing and rewarding the amazing service they provide riders, and we want riders to expect more from every journey, whether it's extra comfort or being rewarded for their loyalty. We will continue to rely on great partnerships to introduce and retain riders and unlock more value for them. Our DoorDash partnership is an example of this. As of Q4, we supported nearly 8 million DoorDash rides and helped us reach a record number of scheduled rides.
In 2025, we plan to continue to expand our margin in customer-obsessed ways. You'll see Lyft Media continue to grow, thanks to the success we've had with our in-app ads. We're also launching full-screen vertical video ad capabilities. Riders open the Lyft app millions of times each day, and we're making sure marketers can connect with them effectively. Another customer-obsessed way we're expanding margins is by improving our premium offerings. Lyft Black and Lyft SUV rides grew 41% year-on-year in 2024, resulting from fine-tuning vehicle eligibility, increasing supply, and launching the mode in more markets across the US and Canada. We are thrilled with the enthusiastic response to these offerings. In 2025, we'll see the Lyft platform expand to include autonomous vehicles, starting with our partner May Mobility in Atlanta. Yesterday, we announced a partnership with Marubeni, who will be the first to use Mobileye AV technology to develop their fleet on the Lyft platform, starting in Dallas as early as 2026 with more cities to follow.
The AV future will have many players across the value chain, and Lyft will have access to a network of more than 44 million active riders. The AVs will be a transformational addition to the marketplace. As I've said before, the more AVs, the more rideshare market expands, and the better Lyft does. In closing, to all Lyft team members, you have crushed it. In the past 12 months, you've dramatically improved service to riders and drivers to industry-leading levels and reached all-time highs in riders, rides, and driver hours. I appreciate every second and ounce of energy you put into Lyft. We have never been in a stronger position and have much opportunity ahead. I can't wait for all we accomplish together in 2025. Over to you, Erin.
Thanks, David. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. 2024 was a remarkable year for Lyft. It was the first year in our multi-year plan and we over-delivered on every target we provided at our Investor Day, from active riders and frequency to cost efficiencies and progress against our dilution targets. As David discussed in detail, we significantly enhanced our service, making it more reliable for drivers and riders, which resulted in record financial performance for the full year. The bottom line is we are now operating from a position of strength. Our improved financial health lays the foundation for years to come. Now let's walk through some key financial highlights from 2024. Gross bookings for the year was $16.1 billion, up 17% year-over-year, roughly matching our rides growth. Driven by substantial progress in the health of our marketplace, notably with drivers, Primetime decreased, driving real savings and more reliable pricing to our riders.
In 2024, we made substantial progress on efficiency and cost discipline, delivering 17% efficiency in the deployment of customer incentives on a per-ride basis, which significantly outpaced our goal of 10%. This led to our unit economics continuing to improve even with increased insurance costs. We exceeded our original profit outlook with adjusted EBITDA margin as a percentage of gross bookings of 2.4%. This was our first full year of GAAP profitability, and we achieved free cash flow of $766 million. Looking ahead to Q1, we expect year-over-year rides growth driven by durable demand. We will continue to price competitively while balancing seasonal dynamics. Our Q1 guidance includes rides growth in the mid-teens year-over-year, gross bookings growth of approximately 10% to 14% year-over-year, and adjusted EBITDA of approximately $90 million to $95 million. Given our partnership strategy, we remain confident in our growth.
We believe in the strength of our market and our ability to run the business efficiently. We've never been better positioned to take advantage of the massive opportunity ahead. Given our outstanding 2024 performance, our conviction in the business to deliver robust free cash flow, and our commitment to maximize shareholder value, I have two updates to share. First, our Board has authorized a $500 million share buyback program to offset dilution from stock-based compensation. Second, we plan to reduce our overall leverage by repaying our convertible notes due in May 2025 with cash on the balance sheet. With that, I conclude our prepared remarks, and we are now ready to take questions.
分析師問答
Your first question comes from Doug Anmuth of JPMorgan. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks for taking the questions. It's Bryan Smilek on for Doug. I guess, just digging a bit deeper into the recent pricing environment, can you just provide more factors and color just on what's weighing on the Q1 gross bookings outlook? Is it framed more as downward pressure or just more broadly, monitoring increases versus recent years? Thanks.
Hey, Bryan, it's David. I'll start with that and give you a little perspective on pricing in general, and then Erin can talk more specifically about the impact. As everyone knows, we have a very straightforward pricing strategy: to price competitively and reliably. Competitive means exactly what it sounds like, and it's important. We now have a couple of years of doing this and we're quite responsive to adjustments. Reliable is also crucial, and we've worked hard on reducing Primetime as a tailwind for rides because that's what riders like – reliable pricing. We've introduced products like Price Lock, which we can discuss further. So, all things considered, this suggests we're in a dynamic marketplace where prices can fluctuate, and we're equipped to handle that. Erin, do you want to share more about recent trends?
Yeah. Thanks, Bryan. There was a lot in your question. So, bear with me for a minute because I'm providing some context that’s important. Pricing in the Lyft marketplace has been stable overall. We've seen steady gradual price increases over time. Recently, late in Q4, we saw new dynamics leading to generally lower prices across the US market. Our strategy remains to price competitively, so we adjusted base prices accordingly. These decisions are made to balance the marketplace. Returning to January, we observed continued strong foundational growth in rides, with growth in the high teens on a year-over-year basis, with our price on a per-mile basis being at the lowest point it’s been in the last five quarters. So that provides some perspective for trends.
Great. Thank you very much both.
Hey guys, thanks for taking my question. I think your largest competitor in the US kind of talked about their volume or bookings growth in areas that had new entrants in the market, particularly from Waymo. Can you provide something similar regarding your experiences in San Francisco, for example? Also, with the pricing environment changing and lower prices, how confident are you in the trajectory of take rates and gross margins, which seemed to be positively trending at least in Q4? Thank you.
Sure. Hey, Michael, it's David. I'll take the first question first and briefly touch on the second. Regarding market entrants, in San Francisco, our share remains roughly flat despite the presence of Waymo's vehicles. This suggests the market is growing, or those vehicles are taking share from others, but not us. In Phoenix, however, our growth is actually outpacing and remains stronger. Thus, we believe self-driving cars will ultimately expand the market. In terms of margins, our confidence remains high. We can leverage various tools and different segments to maintain margin growth. Erin, do you have additional insights?
Sure. The bottom line is our platform is healthier than ever from an execution and financial standpoint. Our long-range plan remains our North Star, and the foundations are stronger than before. We are optimistic about further growth and profitability in 2025 and beyond. Looking forward to Q1, we want to maintain our growth drivers while running the business efficiently and effectively. We have strong models and strategies for profitability moving forward.
Thanks so much for taking the question. I'd love to revisit the state of driver supply and preferences for Lyft as a platform. Can you discuss what you've accomplished in 2024 regarding driver supply and how you're thinking about investments in this area looking into 2025?
Sure, Eric, great to hear your voice. Let's take a moment to celebrate our driver preference gap compared to our largest competitor, which is now at 16 percentage points. We achieved this by investing in our drivers and recognizing their importance. We initiated several improvements, including the 70% earnings guarantee and addressing various operational issues. We've utilized AI to help resolve driver inquiries more efficiently, saving drivers time and increasing satisfaction. Moving forward, we expect to spend less on driver acquisition and retention, as we’re implementing reward programs for dedicated drivers. Ultimately, when drivers are successful, our platform succeeds.
Thank you for taking my question. Could you elaborate on your partnership with Marubeni and Mobileye? How does it fit together, and what are your plans for expansion beyond Dallas?
Sure. This announcement underscores our commitment to AV technology and investing in partnerships that matter. Marubeni will be integral to managing the financial and fleet operations aspects of our AV rollout, which will initially start in Dallas with a scalable vision for other locations. Our goal is to build long-term partnerships that allow us to integrate AVs into our service seamlessly.
Thanks for taking my question. Any commentary regarding the magnitude of contribution you expect from Price Lock this year? And could you provide details on your advertising revenue?
Sure. We exited 2024 with an annualized bookings run rate of approximately $50 million for the media business, and for 2025, we aim to hit around $100 million. Regarding Price Lock, while we won’t disclose specific financials, we have seen positive adoption rates since its launch, and it's crucial for rider loyalty.
Thank you. David, reflecting on your goals when you first became CEO, how have you helped consumers view Lyft differently than just a coin flip with Uber?
Great question! I believe we've made significant strides but there’s still work to be done. Our biggest challenge is inertia. We need to showcase to riders that Lyft is not just an alternative but often the better choice. We will continue to emphasize our services, consistently innovating to highlight why a customer should choose Lyft. You will see us being more vocal about our strengths moving forward.
Just two questions for Erin. Can you provide insights into the factors driving the outperformance in cost of revenue and also elaborate on the decrease in G&A quarter-over-quarter?
For cost of revenue, our recent results reflect shorter trip distances impacting our costs and resulting in a better outcome than guided. In terms of G&A, this line can fluctuate due to tax and legal accruals, but no specific issues were present this quarter.
Thank you. Regarding your three-year outlook, what's your latest thinking with the 15% bookings growth goal?
Looking at 2027, we remain confident in our plans. While market dynamics may shift quarter by quarter, our fundamental growth remains. Our confidence extends to various strategic areas that will allow us to retain our margins and pursue goals. Thank you all. 2024 was a remarkable year for us, and we believe we are in a strong position. I’m excited about what lies ahead as we continue to serve and connect millions of drivers and riders every day. Thank you for joining us, and we look forward to our next discussions.
Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our conference call. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines.