After a long gap, Uber Freight’s revenue turns higher from year earlier

Now reporting operating income rather than EBITDA, red ink still prevails but management upbeat

Uber Freight's management found cause for optimism in its numbers. (Photo: Uber Freight)

Uber Freight reported its financial performance on the basis of operating income rather than EBITDA for the first time, but the negative numbers came as revenue turned up after a long stretch of lower numbers.

The operating loss for the first quarter at the company known primarily as a digital broker was $30 million. While this quarter was the first time where Uber’s three segments–Mobility, Delivery and Freight–were reported on the basis of operating income rather than EBITDA, the company’s earnings statement did report operating income at Uber Freight for the first quarter of 2025 as a loss of $25 million.

In the company’s supplemental information released with the earnings, the operating loss for the second, third and fourth quarters of last year at Uber Freight was $26 million, $40 million and $18 million, respectively.

When Uber Freight (NYSE: UBER) reported income on an EBITDA basis, it only squeaked out a positive number in the third and fourth quarters of 2022, and was breakeven on an EBITDA basis in the fourth quarter of last year. Otherwise, it was negative each quarter since its inception.

But revenue rose to $1.34 billion from $1.26 billion a year ago. Freight revenue in the fourth quarter was $1.27 billion. 

Not since the third quarter of 2024 could Uber Freight do a year-on-year quarterly comparison and see revenue more than what it was four quarters earlier. Between the third quarter of 2023 and 3Q 2024, Uber Freight eked out a gain in revenue of $25 million. 

But in the first quarter of 2026, the year-on-year revenue gain was $47 million. 

In a post on LinkedIn, Uber Freight CEO Rebecca Tinucci was upbeat about Uber Freight’s prospects, noting that the year-on-year increase in revenue was the first for the group in two years. (Uber DEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who rarely mentions Uber Freight in the company’s earnings calls with analysts, also cited the revenue increase in this quarter’s session).

“At a high level, Freight delivered strong topline performance, driven by continued strength in enterprise demand and Managed Transportation — even as the market tightened in ways we haven’t seen in some time,” Tinucci said. “The team continued to lean in with customers through the tightening — maintaining service while others pulled back.”

Tinucci added that new enterprise customers came with about $165 million in “new addressable spend.” That figure was roughly equal to all new customer spend from 2025, Tinucci said.

The Managed Transportation group at Uber Freight has its roots in the legacy Transplace acquisition from 2021. Transplace is known primarily as a provider of transportation management systems to shippers.

Tinucci said Uber Freight has been seeing “a more unified approach across the business — bringing together Managed Transportation and brokerage in a way that’s driving growth across both and reinforcing the value of a more integrated model for enterprise customers.”

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John Kingston

John has an almost 40-year career covering commodities, most of the time at S&P Global Platts. He created the Dated Brent benchmark, now the world’s most important crude oil marker. He was Director of Oil, Director of News, the editor in chief of Platts Oilgram News and the “talking head” for Platts on numerous media outlets, including CNBC, Fox Business and Canada’s BNN. He covered metals before joining Platts and then spent a year running Platts’ metals business as well. He was awarded the International Association of Energy Economics Award for Excellence in Written Journalism in 2015. In 2010, he won two Corporate Achievement Awards from McGraw-Hill, an extremely rare accomplishment, one for steering coverage of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and the other for the launch of a public affairs television show, Platts Energy Week.