Now all of Amazon’s investments over time have made it seemingly impregnable in numerous areas, from logistics and delivery to cloud computing. Wall Street is not complaining about Amazon anymore, and it has become one of the world’s most valuable public companies with a market capitalization of about $960 billion.
“Uber, like Amazon, operates with an obsession on customer value over anything else,” said Mitchell Green, a venture capitalist at Lead Edge Capital, which invested in Uber.
Amazon’s experience is meaningful for Uber as it also expands into new businesses to set the stage for future growth.
Those include Uber Eats, its restaurant delivery service. Started in 2014 as an experiment, it became part of a line of thinking that Uber could one day deliver anything and everything to people whenever they wanted it, at the touch of a button. Internally, that idea was called Uber Everything.
While Uber Everything stalled, Uber Eats boomed. The division is on track to book more than $10 billion in deliveries in 2019, up from $6 billion in 2018. It is also projected to take a 27 percent share of the food delivery market by the end of 2019, up from 3 percent in 2016, according to Wedbush Securities.
Uber is also building Uber Freight, a service that matches local truck drivers with shippers in the United States and the European Union. It has contracted with more than 36,000 carriers serving more than 1,000 companies, according to filings, and the business generated more than $125 million in revenue in the final quarter of 2018.
In addition, Uber acquired Jump, an e-bike and scooter company, last year and is working on autonomous vehicles. Mr. Khosrowshahi has said he plans to make Uber the hub for many modes of transportation, from cars to bikes to scooters to cities’ public buses, trains and subway systems.
