Lyft, Inc. (LYFT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. So in the interest of time, I think we're going to get started. It's great to welcome the team from Lyft back to the conference. This year, we've got Erin Brewer, CFO. Before we kick off, I am going to read the safe harbor, so stick with me. Before we start, Lyft would like to remind you that during the fireside chat today, we'll make forward-looking statements, which involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those statements. The company will also discuss both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Statements made today are effective only today and will not be updated to reflect subsequent events or circumstances that may arise. Okay. So thank you. I forgot to read that in an earlier session. So that's good accomplishment for me.

So to level set, there's been a lot going on at the company. You've done the FREENOW acquisition. You've talked about and announced AV partnerships. You continue to put up strong financial performance. Why don't we level set the conversation by the evolution the company has been going through and just sort of where we are today in terms of the journey of the transition of the company against the broader strategic initiatives you're trying to initiate.

Yes. It's a great way -- I don't know if my mic is on, can you hear me okay? Okay. It's a great way to start off the conversation. It reminds me back 2.5 years ago, I don't know if you remember this, but I remember this. About 8 weeks after I joined the company, I was here with you on stage at my first investor conference. So it's a great entry question and a grounding way to think about the journey that Lyft has been on. If I think about today, you mentioned closing the acquisition of FREENOW, the autonomous partnerships that we've announced, we're really at the cusp of defining what it means today to be a global mobility platform. The journey has been starting from a place several years ago where we were largely North America focused, not profitable, using cash and frankly, playing a little bit of catch-up. Fast forward to today where we've built this incredible foundation, strong growth across our rider base, our driver hours, strong foundation of profitability and really a global platform that's got multiple engines for growth as we look out into the future. So I'll touch on a couple of those. Really, everything starts, you'll probably hear me answer a lot of questions starting from the foundation of operational excellence, right? These scaled businesses require discipline, focus and excellence to operate, whether it's the day-to-day operation of the marketplace, the focus on the foundations of just running an abundantly financially healthy enterprise overall. So it really starts from there. That encompasses anything from the way that we innovate products, the way that we add new rider types of partnerships to the marketplace. And so we've demonstrated a really strong trajectory there. You can continue to see -- expect to see us grow there in the future. The second area is really around this global platform, right? It presents a next avenue for growth, really interesting opportunity for Lyft across a number of vectors, not only the opportunity that we see to grow organically what we've acquired in FREENOW, but it makes us just a much broader and more interesting platform across our rider partnerships, autonomous partnerships, you look further down the road, eventually our ads business. And so it's a really, again, strong growth engine as we think about the future. And then finally, the autonomous landscape, which I'm sure we'll get into in a little bit more detail. But this is a really exciting space for Lyft. We see it as expanding the overall market. We're very excited about the way we are uniquely positioned to service it going forward. And so yes, the journey has been absolutely tremendous, right? We built the foundation. The business is operating today better than it ever has been. We've proven the model. We've proven we can grow this model and deliver exceptional financial results. And now we are positioned to accelerate. So it's a super exciting time to be at Lyft. The teams are incredibly excited about what's ahead of us.

Okay. Good stuff. I do want to start a little bit big picture because we still get a lot of questions from investors just thinking about the core mobility growth. Like what is the compounded algorithm? We continue to get questions about how to think about user growth, frequency, pricing. When you overlay the strategy on top of where you want to go from a growth perspective, how does that formula look to the company?

Yes. I'm going to kind of go back and reference because it's as relevant today as it was back at our Investor Day, but we really outlined a framework that is grounded in the growth of active riders and the growth of frequency. And really, everything that we do around supporting that growth overall is driving toward that growth, and we delivered record growth across both of those categories. So let me talk a little bit about what we've done because it's super informative about where we're going in the future. So again, it all starts around operational excellence. You'll hear this theme again, but it matters. It matters when you are operating a scaled platform. It really matters that you're delivering reliable pricing, fast ETAs. That really is the core of what keeps riders coming back, allows them to expand. Hey, I had a great experience, I'm going to use that for a lot more use cases. And we've got room to grow there. Don't forget, we've talked about in the beginning of this year, not only growing across the markets where we're already strong, but we've talked now for a couple of quarters about what we call underpenetrated markets. These tend to be outside of our top cities. They still represent 2/3 of the TAM that exists just across North America. So tremendous opportunity for us to continue to grow. So in many ways, we're just getting started. We've highlighted growth in cities like Charlotte, like Indianapolis that are growing at rates above 30%. And so that fueled by that core operational excellence is going to continue to deliver active rider growth, continue to drive growth and frequency. The second area is around product innovation. The team is extremely proud to be a category leader here in the innovative products that we've introduced to the market, whether it's Price Lock, driver earnings commitment, Silver, Women+ Connect, everything that engages, engages category of riders that we already have today, but does a great job engaging new categories of riders. And so you're going to continue to see us lean in and be a leader and an innovator as it relates to product innovation. And then final area is partnerships. Partnerships are really important pillar in this. We, again, highlighted this framework at our Investor Day, but we've built what we think is a really best-in-class array of partnerships. We're super excited to add United to that and launch with them in the upcoming quarters. But grow through partnerships, just in Q2 alone, right, 50 million rides were attached to a partnership. So it's a very strong portfolio for Lyft, but it's also still underpenetrated, right? None of those partnerships are more than 20% penetrated. So we have runway there to continue to drive that strong active rider growth and grow frequency. That's the foundation of the formula.

Great. And maybe just building on one piece of it because I think you guys have been at the forefront of talking about affordability and tying affordability to product innovation. What do you think as you go out and talk to investors, because we get the question a lot, it still remains some of the underappreciated parts of how affordability can stimulate growth? Like what have you guys learned about driving innovation by making the product more accessible that gives you the confidence in the long-term?

Yes. It's sort of interesting that the notion of the affordability conversation has come back around. I've definitely heard some of the similar questions. But I guess what I would say is that there's nothing new about the concept of affordability at Lyft, right? This is in our DNA, not just at the more affordable end of our product offering. We've got a great product called the Wait & Save, where you trade time for price. But we take that same focus, service customer obsession all the way in through the highest-value modes of our product offering. So it's not something that's just applicable in one place, it's applicable across the category. And we've grown all of those categories. The mix overall hasn't changed. We've seen pretty strong growth on the high end, but I think that proves that we've got a really customer-obsessed mindset around the affordability. And I think Price Lock has been a really interesting product. It's not necessarily at its core around affordability, but what it does is really strengthen a use case, which is around high-frequency riders. They want to have pricing predictability. They don't want to think about at the beginning of the workday and the end of the workday, checking and should I wait 20 minutes. They want that locked in. They want to know that it's going to be there when they need it. And that's been a great example of an innovation that really gets at the pain point. Price Lock riders ride more frequently. The retention rate is very high. And so it's that kind of thinking. But I just kind of come back around and say, affordability as a focus for us and making sure we're serving that part of the market is not new.

Okay. So when you think about this algorithm for growth and you measure it against the current competitive environment in the space, how much room do you think you have to innovate and drive change in the industry against the competitive dynamic. Is the competitive dynamic generally stable, rising, falling? How do you think about offsetting competition with innovation?

Yes. So I would say, generally, we operate in a pretty stable overall competitive environment. This is a competitive market. I think that's great for riders and drivers. We will remain proud to be at the leading edge of that innovation. We think that matters and we do it in an exceptionally thoughtful way. So I'm going to take a minute and talk about one of our most recent innovations, Lyft Silver, because I think it really demonstrates that thoughtful way of launching a product. It's everything, thinking about a rider's journey, a rider who is generally 65-plus, everything from nervousness about doing something wrong on the app, having a live person that they can talk to that can coach them through various pieces, having particular connections with family members where they can get alerts, everything from top to bottom is thought through with such care and such detail and such input, frankly, from the customers that we're trying to serve. So what does that mean? Not only are we attracting riders who have ridden with Lyft, but we're bringing new riders into the platform. The growth is accelerating. They stay. The retention rates are higher than 80%. And don't forget, this is a growing demographic. Adults 65 and older in the U.S. are about 18% of the population today. That's going to grow over the next 5 years to 20% and then beyond. And so it's that kind of really thoughtful approach. I'm obviously not going to preview anything that is upcoming. But to give folks a sense of the way that our teams really think very carefully and obsess over the customers, the design of the product and the use case.

Okay. Just wanted to double click on one more portion of the mobility business. What's the latest update on how the insurance dynamic continues to impact the business? And how do you think about efforts around insurance also feeding back into the affordability elements of driving innovation on the platform at the same time that you're trying to manage through insurance costs?

Yes, absolutely. So insurance costs, obviously, in the U.S., an important component of the overall cost of the ride. We've made really exceptional strides in our program over the last couple of years. I say it every time I get a chance to, but I'm really proud of our teams and the progress that we've made in 2024 when we went through our annual renewal cycle, we highlighted that the impact from that renewal was about a single-digit basis point impact overall on the rates. And so that sort of sets the context for where we were last year. The foundation of what we're working on is very similar. It's a multiyear strategic plan. We outlined the core tenets of it at our Investor Day, but it's continuing to innovate around product safety. All of the features and tools that we incorporate along the journey to give alerts around harsh braking or other instances that contribute to an ecosystem where everyone is aware of making the ride safer and safer and safer. Avoiding accidents is, of course, the first place that you want to start. The second place is really around the way that we structure our programs, right? We partner with leading insurance carriers for a portion of our business. We self-insure a smaller portion of our business. But those carriers stay stable and steady over multiple years. Why does that matter? Because we can build deeper and deeper relationships. The way that we take the technology that we've developed, that we leverage that with our partners, that we come together in meaningful ways to get extremely efficient at the way that we adjudicate claims. It's a very detailed process and being able to do that collaboratively with long-term partners has been a big differentiator for us. And then the third pillar is around policy. So continuing to advance what we think are very common sense insurance and tort reforms across the markets that we serve. And we have a history as a company of engaging very collaboratively with lawmakers across all of the jurisdictions that we serve. We've -- in the last 12 months or probably 14 months, you've probably heard us highlight reforms in Georgia, reforms in Florida. I know there's recent news being made about the proposed legislation that's in California. So all of these might have slightly different flavors, but they are exactly alike in a very critical way because it's all about addressing broader accessibility to rideshare. Making prices more affordable, making riders and making the rideshare more accessible. What does that do? It gives drivers a bigger platform, broader business, better earnings opportunities and better overall for the ecosystem. It increases the market overall. That's why we work on it. Because in this business, when you are driving a win for riders and a win for drivers, that is a winning combination for Lyft. And so that's why continued engagement on that public policy side is so important, and you'll continue to see us drive that going forward. So that's a little bit of the background, if you will. Let's kind of take a step back and talk a little bit about numbers because I know that's what people care most about. If you think about the first half of 2025, the CPI for auto insurance inflation is kind of in the high single-digit range. So that's the backdrop with which we are negotiating and looking forward to our 10/1 renewal. I'm not going to give you our rates today, obviously. But the color that I will provide is that I remain highly confident in the programs that we're executing, and I remain very confident that we'll execute this renewal in line, if not slightly better than the observed inflation trends in the industry.

Okay. Super helpful. Let's pivot to AVs. I think when you talk about mobility, you have to talk about AVs and where we're going. And feels like whenever anybody comes to a conference in San Francisco, they always get a little closer to wanting to talk about AVs. You've announced a number of partnerships. Maybe start high level. As a company, what is your world view about the role AVs will play in the broader mobility landscape? And how should we be thinking about the partnerships you've announced being aligned with that strategy of world view.

Absolutely. AVs are a really exciting growth opportunity. I mentioned this as -- when you were asking me to set the strategic stage as we think about the company today and going forward. A very exciting opportunity for us, for our industry overall. So we've thought that for a long time. What's fascinating is to see we now have a handful of cities, obviously, in the U.S., where you have some portion of AVs on the road. And we talked about this in our recent earnings call, our observation in those cities that have some amount of AVs on the road, they are growing at 5x the rate of other equivalent cities who don't have those deployments. So this is not about coming into a city and kind of taking from a pie that is fixed and exists. We are actually seeing the data on the ground about how this expands the use case overall. So that is super exciting. I think the other piece of this is that we absolutely see this developing as a hybrid network over time, right? You've got -- you'll have AVs that are really, really well positioned to execute effectively against predictable routes, kind of probably more high-frequency routes. And then you will absolutely have human drivers that are engaged during times of surge, where there's an event letting out, where there's very complex routes or pick-up, drop-offs or frankly, where that human touch on a ride, whether it's luggage assistance or otherwise is just essential. And so that hybrid landscape is something that we, again, continue to see is how this overall industry will be optimized. So it's a great market. We're seeing all of that evidence. It's still early stages, obviously. You still have a lot of companies out there piloting, experimenting. We are absolutely participating in that. And so we've got some exciting stuff upcoming. You've mentioned the partnerships that we've announced thus far. So we've got May Mobility upcoming in 2025 and then what we've announced in 2026 are opportunities with Baidu, with BENTELER, with Mobileye, Marubeni across 2026. So the teams are deeply engaged in the various stages of where those rollouts and planned deployments are. So we've got a lot upcoming, and we'll continue to build in that area over time. So it's an exciting area overall. You can expect -- because I'm the CFO. I'm going to talk a little bit about financially where this is. You can expect over the coming years, while the Lyft platform will remain absolutely kind of asset-light, in these early stages, you can expect that we will invest strategically in AV-focused depots. Don't forget, we operate a number of depots today through our Flexdrive business in more of the traditional auto rental and rideshare, but we will invest in some more focused depots. And then you can expect that we will, in a limited way, invest in cars where we are either entering markets or doing pilots. We think that will make sense over time. Don't forget today on our balance sheet, we have thousands of cars that we utilize and exist through our Flexdrive facility. So that's a bit of the way we see it. We think we have some unique advantages that make us pretty interesting to partners. Obviously, the expansion of our global platform with FREENOW is one element of that, but also the unique capability that exists and is embedded within our team about how do you utilize and optimize a financial asset, which at the end of the day, a car or an AV will be. And extremely importantly, Lyft has a very solid background and FREENOW does too, another strong asset that comes with that acquisition of deep collaborative engagement across the municipalities and cities where we operate. And that's going to be critical and important as we think about the rollout and the maturation of this market.

Okay. Understood. Maybe building on that, as these array of partnerships get rolled out, how do you as a company think about the levers of monetization, the levers of unit economics? Like what does adding this supply to the network do? What impact does it have on how sort of the business looks and operates on -- in an end state? I know we're nowhere near the end state. But I'm just kind of curious how you -- the working assumption about how you think that evolves.

Yes, absolutely. Look, again, in these early stages, we are in a number of these different models. So are other players in the industry, experimenting with how they intend to go to market, how they intend to do fleet management, utilization optimization. So there's a lot of integrating experimentation. That will continue for some time. We're also in an environment where we are not near at scale, right? And so if you think about unit economics, the unit economics of today are not what they will ultimately be at scale. And that's going to require a set of assumptions around how you think the tech stack, the auto platform, et cetera, are going to be over time. It'd probably be too premature for me to give you a definitive formula. But fair to say that the unit economics over time and at scale, we think are attractive, are additive into a growing market basket.

Interesting. Okay. You teased it out earlier in one of your answers, but maybe we can pivot to geographic expansion. So I think at a high level, one of the questions I get a lot is, what was the strategic rationale behind doing FREENOW. You weren't a player in Europe. This was an asset you acquired. It wasn't a lot of capital. But how do you -- why that asset, what was the strategic rationale? And how should investors think about that as a jumping off point to possibly allocating additional capital into international opportunities.

Yes. I think any time you do M&A, you have to be pretty deliberate around the strategy you're trying to execute, the culture of the company that you're trying to acquire and what platforms for growth that presents beyond just the one plus one equals two. And really FREENOW hits the mark across all of those categories. And so this was, in our view, a very strategic, very efficient way to enter a major market. With FREENOW comes entry into 9 countries. We saw the opportunity -- it's a good little business in and of itself, but we saw the opportunity even organically to make it better to raise the bar overall on service, to take some of the advancements that we've made in our existing business and take it across to FREENOW. So that's just at the base level. But there's much more beyond that, too, that made this really, really interesting. If you think about Lyft, we chatted a little bit ago about one of the foundations being the strength of our partnership ecosystem. All of those partners, Hilton, Chase, DoorDash, Alaska Air, they're international, right? And so it makes us a much more interesting global partner for our rider-facing partnerships. No doubt a much more interesting partner as you think about autonomous. And then further down the road, as you extend the platform, it makes you more interesting to global brands who engage with Lyft today, who operate at global scale. So we saw a number of vectors for growth and synergy opportunity with this platform overall. FREENOW, for those of you who are not as familiar, is a leader in taxi aggregation across 9 markets in Europe. Taxi is a little bit different. It's an elevated product in Europe, and I'll maybe talk about some of the economics very briefly. It tends to carry a higher average gross bookings per ride than our historical North America-focused business. So that's kind of starting from the gross bookings level. And then if you go down to revenue margin, it carries a pretty different revenue margin characteristic from the classic North American-focused business. So think about revenue margins in the low teens compared to revenue margins in the classic North American business that are sort of in the mid-30%. And so hopefully, that level sets about revenue margins. Obviously, in terms of unit economics, the FREENOW business carries a much different cost of revenue because the insurance profile is quite different. So you get pretty equivalent like out-of-the-gate starting unit economics. But it's really that revenue margin that's quite a bit different and maybe to help your clients further think about that in a little bit more helpful way. So based on the mix of business today, FREENOW coming in and Lyft, we think that revenue margin impact on a per month basis is about 50 basis points. So remember, in the third quarter, we're going to have 2 months of FREENOW in our results. That's about 100 basis points. Q4, 3 months, about 150 basis points. So an opportunity to clarify, I think, something that certainly we have multiple conversations about in terms of the economic profile.

Totally understood, Erin. Yes. I wanted to ask quickly, that was an acquisition. Canada and Puerto Rico, examples of markets you went into organically. How should we think about what the early lessons or learnings are from those markets?

Yes, two different markets, right? Canada, Lyft operated in for many years, but I would venture to say that over a number of years, the focus on that market was not what it was. That changed a couple of years ago. And since that change of very deliberate focus in those markets, really building our brand overall amongst drivers, demonstrating the value that we can bring to riders as well, the growth has been tremendous. And so you've heard us talk over the last 6, 7 quarters about the growth in Canada. There continue to be strong opportunities. We've just launched within the last couple of quarters, a couple of new provinces. So in many ways, that will continue to have strong growth opportunities going forward. Puerto Rico, smaller market, still very new, but we -- the reception has been beyond our expectations, right? It just goes to show you how a market is looking for competition, looking for the type of innovation that we can bring, the track record and support that we can bring. So we feel great about the launch there. That's a brand-new launch.

Okay. We got a few minutes left. So I'm going to go through a couple of quick questions. But you talked a bit about partnerships and strategies and things that are launching as we get deeper into this year, how should we think about partnerships as an amplifier of the Lyft brand, the Lyft ecosystem over time? How does the management team think about continuing to scale and find partners to maybe drive virality around the platform?

Yes, that's interesting. But what's probably more interesting is we've already assembled, right, an extremely strong cohort when you think about United, Alaska, Hilton, Chase, DoorDash, this is an exceptionally strong portfolio where, again, we're seeing very, very strong rider engagement. The whole value proposition of partnerships is that they bring riders to the platform. The riders are more engaged, meaning they're more loyal. They take more rides. The contour of those rides tend to be a higher mix of higher value rides. They'll take, for example, more airport rides, longer rides, they ride more frequently. So this is a really valuable portfolio overall and frankly, valuable to our partners. No partnership excels unless both partners are winning. And so we have a focus on that very, very clearly. But maybe I'll just touch on DoorDash for a second because that's definitely one of the newer ones. So DoorDash has been an exceptionally strong partnership for us, strong value proposition. The growth rate of riders that it is bringing into that ecosystem continues to grow at a faster rate than the overall business. But in many ways, we're just getting started. That's just about 10% penetrated. So think about the runway that we have ahead. And again, I mentioned across that broader ecosystem. No one is more than 20% penetrated. So we're adding United. That's going to be an exceptional, right? We're gearing up for that. That's going to be exciting for us and exciting for riders in 2026. But I don't want anyone to lose sight that we've got really strong growth opportunities within this fantastic portfolio we have today.

Great. Well understood. Going back to Investor Day, we talked a lot about the media business scaling at Investor Day. You've seen very good results as the advertising business has continued to grow in the more recent periods. Talk about some of the key learnings as advertising or Lyft Media continues to scale and what it means for where you think the business can go over the longer-term?

Yes. So setting the stage, we are well on track to be at our $100 million bookings run rate as we exit 2025 in Q4. So that foundation is strong. We've driven strong growth over the last couple of years. In terms of what's been key to that, I'd point to a couple of things. Over the last 12 months, we brought in a new leader of that business, someone who is extremely steep in ads. She has continued to build the team around her. And so having the depth of that expertise in the industry has been foundational and will continue to provide strong fuel for growth. We continue to grow in-app ads. That's been the pillar. It's across global brands. Those brands, which we talk about on our earnings call, I'm trying to give you an opportunity for your last question, continue to come back to the platform. And we continue to extend that platform in new interesting ways, through audience extensions, think about you're a travel partner and you want to understand a rider that's on their way to the airport and in a privacy respecting way, deliver really valuable experience or we did a campaign with Sephora. And that was a great example of like the digital and the real world coming together and driving really strong foot traffic. So there's -- in addition to the foundation of our in-app business, there's really strong interesting growth vectors that you're going to see from us going forward. So we're excited about where we are.

Great. I do want to just bring it all together. So when I -- you and I have had this opportunity at Investor Days and on earnings calls, and I always seem to ask you some form of this question, priorities for capital in the business, right, investing in growth, allowing margins to continue to expand, returning capital to shareholders. You now are returning capital to shareholders. Talk a little bit about the priorities, how they've shifted? What are you trying to accomplish? What's the dialogue like with respect to capital allocation between management and the Board?

Yes. We're better positioned today, obviously, than we ever have been. It really all starts from the foundation of free cash flow, right? So Q2, we talked about trailing 12 months, just under $1 billion of free cash flow. We outlined a target at our Investor Day that targeted adjusted EBITDA to free cash flow conversion. We well exceeded that in 2024. And we've talked publicly about how we expect that free cash flow conversion in 2025 to be similar to 2024. So very, very strong. And even looking around the corner into 2026, we think we're going to be well above those Investor Day targets. So it all starts from the foundation of the strength of the cash flow generation of the business. But the framework overall for capital allocation, right? Ample liquidity, this is a scale, now global business. Ample liquidity is foundational and a key priority. Growth investments was the second pillar that we outlined. We spent the last however many minutes talking about some pretty exciting growth vectors for this company. FREENOW is a great example of a growth investment. So you should expect to continue to see us looking at avenues for growth of the business and investing against that. And then, of course, shareholder returns. We were super excited to announce and then pretty quickly upsize our inaugural share buyback program. We've obviously been active in executing that over the last -- starting in Q2. And that, combined with our transition to net share settlement about a year ago for employee RSUs has led us to a place that for the first time, we are reducing our share count. And so we will continue to have that capital allocation framework at the foundation of the way that we act going forward. We recently closed a convertible note offering, very successful, right? This has been an attractive market in recent periods of time, very successful offering, very strong terms overall, great engagement and interest across that shareholder base, and it just provides additional flexibility as we think about our growth going forward.

Okay. Super clear on capital allocation. Erin, thanks for giving me the opportunity to have the conversation. Please join me in thanking Lyft for being part of the conference.

Thank you very much. Thank you.