Three segments and one profit measure: Mobility, Delivery and Freight

Segment profit deducts each segment's own costs and, since 2026, includes stock-based compensation and depreciation

Uber splits its business into three segments, Mobility, Delivery and Freight. Each segment's profit is called segment operating income; the course calls it segment profit. It is segment revenue minus the segment's own two kinds of cost, and since 2026 it also counts stock-based compensation and depreciation:

• Platform participant direct costs: In markets that record the full fare as revenue (Unit 1, Lesson 1), payments to drivers, couriers and carriers, plus incentives for riders and eaters.
• Other: Trip insurance, payment fees, customer support, technology, employee pay, brand marketing, customer acquisition and depreciation.

Stock-based compensation is pay given to employees in company shares. It costs no cash, but it is still a cost and sits within employee pay.

Before 2025, the segment profit the company reported left out these two items. In early 2026 it restated (recalculated on the new basis) its quarterly figures back to 2024. Segment profit in this course always uses the new basis and is not compared with the old figures.

Add up segment profit and subtract corporate overhead to reach the company's operating income

One kind of cost is never allocated to any segment: headquarters overhead and platform R&D, such as finance, legal and HR, and technology like maps and payments that every segment uses.

From the segment total down to net income, H1 2026 looked like this:

Non-GAAP operating income is the main profit measure the company has reported since 2026 (not calculated under U.S. GAAP). U.S. GAAP is the common set of accounting rules for U.S.-listed companies.

This measure adds back items such as amortization of acquired intangibles (the cost of acquired intangible assets spread over years) and changes in legal reserves (money set aside for lawsuits), treating them as not costs, but stock-based compensation and depreciation still count as costs.

Operating income is the GAAP figure. Interest, remeasurement of equity stakes (price changes in shares of other companies Uber owns) and taxes are covered in Unit 6.

Rank the three segments by bookings, revenue or profit and you get different answers

Put the three sets of numbers in one table:

Start with Gross Bookings, which measure size. Mobility and Delivery are about the same size, and Freight is much smaller.

Next, revenue: the part Uber actually records, which depends on accounting. Freight records the full shipping fee as revenue (next card), so its revenue almost equals its bookings, and its share of revenue is far larger than its share of bookings.

Finally, segment profit: what is left at the end. Dividing segment profit by Gross Bookings gives, per $100 of bookings, $7.66 for Mobility, $3.77 for Delivery and −$1.86 for Freight.

Segment profit comes mainly from Mobility and Delivery, while Freight is negative. Mobility and Delivery have similar bookings, yet their segment profits differ by about a factor of two; the next lesson breaks this down.

Freight records the full fee, so revenue almost equals bookings, and segment profit is negative

Freight's customers are businesses that need goods moved; Uber connects them with trucking carriers.

The business records revenue on a gross basis: the shipper's full fee is revenue, and the payment to the carrier is a cost.

That differs from most Mobility and Delivery markets, which record only the service fee as revenue.

In Q2 2026, every $100 of Freight Gross Bookings came with about $100.8 of revenue, from which two costs are deducted:

• Payments to carriers: About $92.5, recorded as platform participant direct costs.
• Other costs: About $9.8, mainly the business's own people, technology and operations.

The two costs exceed revenue, leaving segment profit of about −$1.5. Freight's segment profit has been negative every quarter since 2024.

Gross-basis accounting also explains one pattern: in H1 2026, Freight was only 2.6% of total Gross Bookings but 10.7% of total revenue.

So when comparing the size and profit of the three businesses, focus on Gross Bookings and segment profit; revenue shares inflate how big Freight looks.