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Lyft (LYFT), in its first quarterly report as a public company, exceeded Wall Street’s expectations for top-line growth while guiding toward a widening loss.
The San Francisco-based ride sharing company posted an adjusted loss of $9.02 per share on revenue of $776 million for the quarter, nearly doubling revenues from the year-ago quarter. A consensus estimate of Wall Street analysts expected Lyft to post an adjusted loss of $3.97 per share share on revenue of $738.5 million, according to Bloomberg-compiled estimates. However, expectations for Lyft’s first-quarter adjusted loss fluctuated widely in the days leading up to the report.
Shares of Lyft fell 7.15% to $55.16 each as of 11:17 a.m. on Wednesday.
“The first quarter was a strong start to an important year, our first as a public company,” Logan Green, Lyft co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. “Our performance was driven by the increased demand for our network and multi-modal platform, as Active Riders grew 46% and revenue grew 95% year-over-year. Transportation is one of the largest segments of our economy and we are still in the very early stages of an enormous secular shift from personal car ownership to Transportation-as-a-Service.”
Active riders and revenue per active rider – two proxies of growth for the ride-hailing company – each exceeded expectations in the first quarter. Active riders grew 46% year-over-year to 20.5 million, and revenue per active rider increased 34% to $37.86.
Lyft’s guidance for the current quarter and full year also jumped ahead of Wall Street’s expectations. The company sees full-year revenue totaling $3.27 billion to $3.3 billion, beating consensus estimates of $3.26 billion. For the fiscal second quarter, Lyft sees revenues of $800 million and $810 million, higher than the $782.2 million expected.
However, the guidance implies a slowdown in revenue growth, with second-quarter guidance indicating just a 60% year-over-year increase on the high end. Revenue grew 111% in the second quarter of 2018, but company management noted during a call with investors Tuesday that last year’s second quarter results received a boost from the timing of an industry-wide price increase.
Lyft is also guiding toward steeper losses in the quarters to come. Lyft sees adjusted operating losses of between $270 million and $280 million for the fiscal second quarter, wider than the $216 million loss in the first quarter. For the full-year, adjusting operating losses are expected to total between $1.15 billion and $1.175 billion.
On a call with investors Tuesday, Lyft CFO Brian Roberts said the company is on a “clear path to profitability” and anticipates that 2019 will be the company’s “peak loss year” before moving steadily toward a profit on a consolidated basis.