Uber’s Unofficial Earnings Metric Swap Aligns Firm With Big Tech

Uber Technologies Inc. changing the way it communicates earnings to Wall Street emulates the Big Tech titans it’s long positioned itself among, analysts say.

The San Francisco-based ride-hailing and food delivery company plans to overhaul this year the unofficial financial metrics it uses that don’t fall under US accounting rules, according to a recent regulatory filing.

Uber will also give the public a new way of measuring the profitability of its business units that includes stock-based compensation, which is prominent in the tech sector as a way to attract workers. The move, analysts say, demonstrates the company’s growth and pushes the business closer toward the likes of Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.

“It’s just a maturation of Uber,” said Nikhil Devnani, a Bernstein senior analyst covering the US emerging internet sector. “They are now at a point where they have real earnings to anchor on, so to speak, and so it’s sort of the right timing in that sense.”

Businesses like Uber use measures outside of generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, to provide what they see as a clearer view of financial performance. These “non-GAAP” figures usually exclude irregular expenses, like corporate restructuring—and are subject to certain rules from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The 17-year-old company has been using an adjusted version of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, or EBITDA. This commonly used non-GAAP measure aims to convey how much money businesses make just from daily operations.

However, Uber said Jan. 12 in a Form 8-K that will be replaced by three other non-GAAP metrics: operating income, net income, and earnings per share.

The new measures bring the previous metric “closer to GAAP” by including factors that were previously excluded, Uber’s filing said, pointing to stock compensation as an example.

“As our business has scaled, we have taken a deliberate approach to improving the quality of our earnings and encourage investors to assess our investments and performance with these expenses included,” CFO Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah said in Nov. 4 prepared remarks for the company’s third quarter 2025 results.

Uber didn’t answer additional questions about the accounting change and referred Bloomberg Tax to the 8-K filing and Mahendra-Rajah’s previous statement.

Tech Earnings

Uber’s new metrics—including a measure aimed at portraying how much money it makes for each share—position the company closer to Big Tech giants, said Bernie McTernan, senior analyst at Needham & Co.

Meta and Alphabet often highlight earnings per share figures in press releases, while Doordash Inc. and Maplebear Inc., which does business as Instacart, showcase their adjusted versions of EBITDA.

Investors “look at Meta and Google, for example, on EPS, versus even historically we always looked at DoorDash and Uber on an EBITDA basis,” McTernan said.

Like the other new measures, Uber’s earnings per share will include stock compensation and depreciation, which involves the allocation of an asset’s cost over its useful life.

Payroll and data centers that depreciate over time are part of Uber’s business model, Devnani said.

“There will be these things that are more day-to-day that they want to sort of incorporate and burden the cost base with, which I think is again what they should be doing in a high-quality sense,” Devnani said.

Segment Profits

Financial statement users will be on the lookout for whether Uber includes a breakdown of stock compensation for its three business units: mobility, delivery, and freight.

Public companies are required under an accounting rulebook update to disclose “significant” business unit expenses that are regularly provided to top decision makers and included within each measure of segment profit or loss.

“The level of that profit or loss measure is going to determine what types of expenses are available to be disclosed as ‘significant,’” Ohio State University associate accounting professor Kurt Gee said.

Uber has been among many companies using adjusted EBITDA as their business unit metric of profitability. The metric is the most commonly used non-GAAP metric in segment disclosures, according to research by accounting professors Matthew Ege, Antonis Kartapanis, and Benjamin Whipple.

Adjusted EBITDA can be helpful for “comparing across different companies, some of which may have grown organically, some of which may have grown through acquisition,” said Whipple, an accounting professor at the University of Georgia.

Uber’s new segment performance measure—an adjusted version of operating income—is further down the income statement, meaning it now includes items like stock compensation, Gee said.

Whether Uber will include stock compensation expenses by segment is uncertain. The company will include the new profit measure in its first quarter report, slated to be filed in the spring.

‘Why Isn’t It in There?’

While shifting away from adjusted EBITDA is a “step in the right direction,” Uber didn’t go straight to using pure operating income but rather made its own adjustments, accounting analyst Jack Ciesielski said.

Uber’s non-GAAP metric excludes amortization of intangible assets like patents the company acquires. Amortization spreads the intangible’s cost over its useful life.

“If you’ve got an asset that’s producing revenue and it costs you something to obtain it, why isn’t it in there?” Ciesielski said.

SEC officials have urged companies to proceed cautiously when providing non-GAAP metrics in their segment disclosures. Broadly, the SEC warns against using measures that could be misleading and requires companies to meet certain requirements like reconciling unofficial figures to their most directly comparable GAAP metric.

Bruce Pounder, executive director of accounting advisory firm GAAP Lab, questioned moving from one unofficial metric to another.

“Knowing the issues with non-GAAP reporting, knowing the issues with segment reporting discretion, I have to ask myself the question, ‘Why? Why would you get your non-GAAP measures closer to GAAP instead of just going with GAAP measures?’” Pounder said.