Deep Dive
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Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news. Lyft CEO Dave Risher joins us for more. Good morning, David. There's something really interesting in your kind of forward-looking strategy commentary on the call. Uber talked about something the same. There are parts of this country, America, where ride share is less pervasive. People don't use as much. Probably they drive their own car. You want to go after that market. Why and how?
So the answer is we've gotten really good at obsessing over our customers and we want to take it bigger and go bigger. I mean, look, this is our 16th consecutive quarter of growth. You know, we're a profitable company. We're generating $900 million of cash. And yet, yet the ride share market is still tiny, 160 billion rides in the United States every year. And we only do a couple of three billion between the two of us. So
There's so much opportunity, it really is better to be in the back of the car having someone else drive you and we wanna do it in places like Indianapolis and others where the opportunity's even bigger. - Cash, when last year on, which was just a few weeks ago, we were talking about M&A in Europe and with respect, it was a modest deal.
The buyback is clearly well-received by your investors. But that would indicate that you have some ability to do M&A going forward. Do you see that in your capital plans? And if you did buy something, what would it be?
So first, thanks for acknowledging. It's true. I mean, this is a business that is now generating nearly a billion dollars of cash in the 12 months. So that's a wonderful place to be. Again, huge thanks to the incredible team that has been working so dang hard to make this business not only great for customers, but great for shareholders as well.
So now the question is, right, what are other opportunities? I would say our near-term focus is making the cash that we've got, you know, putting it to work. As you say, we just acquired FreeNow, which will allow us to expand internationally. You know, nothing more, obviously, to announce right now, aside from the buyback, of course. But it's great to be in a strong position. We've got a strong balance sheet and a strong income statement. So it feels that's a good place to be. And it's a strong position that you managed to fend off Engine Capital, David, in terms of an...
a pushy investor wanting changes, potentially at a board level, but they've withdrawn that because of what you've given to the investor base in terms of buybacks. David, is that a sigh of relief? I mean, you know, we talk to investors all the time. I would say maybe not so much the sigh of relief as much as just it absolutely allows us to continue to focus on our riders and our drivers. That's sort of the big thing. But it's great that investors are responding so well to what it is that we're doing. Again, a share buyback is great.
You know, profitable growth, you know, quarter after quarter, that's great. And this is what I've always said. It's customer obsession that drives profitable growth. And we're sort of seeing that play out now. And that customer obsession drives innovation, drives autonomous vehicles. I know you're looking at Atlanta. You've got a partnership there. How much are you going to see driverless vehicles automatically? You're going to have safety drivers in the car. What is that going to look like as a pilot?
Yeah, so this is a pilot that we're doing with May Mobility. First, let's step back. Autonomous vehicles are going to come, right? They're here in San Francisco. You see them everywhere. They're obviously in LA and Austin and other places as well. They'll come. It'll be many, many years before they're a big deal, but as they come, it's such a great opportunity for rideshare and for Lyft because it allows us to provide better service using different technologies.
As you say, we'll be starting in Atlanta in a couple of months, middle of the summer. We will start with a sort of a confidence driver, someone else in the car to kind of help make sure that people feel comfortable with what's going on there. It'll be a fairly small scale pilot, but this is something that will grow into Texas next year with a partnership with Mobileye and others. And then we'll just keep building and building and building to the point where drivers are driving millions of people and autonomous vehicles are driving millions of people as well.
David, you're a technology CEO and as such you must field questions on economics and the state of trade and travel. It's our favorite thing to do. Everyone loves this question. Uber reflected on the idea of cross-border travel, Canada into the U.S., the inbound travel into the U.S. being soft business travel. People arrive at airports, are they or are they not doing rideshare? What are you seeing through the consumer about the state of this economy?
Honestly, we're seeing strength. And I know a lot of people are trying to look at this. Granular, where, why, how? So I'll give you a couple of examples. Let's actually go back literally to earlier this week, Cinco de Mayo, right? That's not a holiday that's necessarily a huge thing. But at the same time, we saw one of our biggest Cinco de Mayos ever. It was a very, very strong day. Let's go back to the end of March. Last week of March was actually our strongest week ever in terms of ride volume. I think what we're seeing here is ride share has become a very sort of
base staple part of so many people's lives that I don't really expect a sort of consumer sentiment fluctuates around to see that much difference. I'll talk about airports for just a second because you asked. Airports basically quarter to quarter are flat. It is true. Consumer, excuse me, commute is going up faster. So if you look at it that way, consumers growing a little bit faster, excuse me, commute, I keep saying that.
But, you know, again, even when you look at airports, gosh, it's only one in five people who use rideshare to get to airports in the first place. That means 80% is still out there for sort of the, you know, the picking. So I think our big focus is trying to expand the market. I don't think that the macro stuff is a big deal right now for us. You're growing in Canada.
David, and it's interesting, I've asked this time and time again, asked it of IBM, asked it of Uber, asked it of you. Is there any impact from being an American brand going into a country such as Canada right now? Because we are hearing of pushback. 30 seconds.
You know, it's so interesting. No is the real answer. In fact, we just got authorization to open in Quebec, in the province of Quebec, which we might have wondered whether it was going to happen given everything going on. So, no, we've actually seen acceptance. Actually, Toronto is a big city for us. It's going super well. David Roescher, so great to catch up with you. Congrats on the numbers. We appreciate it. Nice to see you. Always a pleasure.
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