Lyft stock plunges after first-quarter earnings report

Lyft’s stock plunged after the company shared its first-quarter earnings report Tuesday and told investors costs would remain up as it invests more in incentives to attract drivers.

Lyft’s first-quarter performance and forecast for investors also led to rival company Uber’s stock falling Tuesday. 

This prompted Uber to push up the time of its own earnings report release from Wednesday afternoon to the morning, saying that it wanted to provide a more “timely update on the company’s performance and guidance before the market opens.”

Lyft is poised to lose more than a quarter of its market value on Wednesday, Bloomberg reported. 

The company’s shares fell by as much as 29 percent to $21.90 in New York, marking the steepest drop in a single session and a 72 percent drop from the record high of $78.29 that it reached in March 2019, according to the outlet. 

The drop comes after Lyft reported a revenue of $875.6 million for the first quarter of the year, an increase of 44 percent from the same period last year. The company also reported a net loss of $196.9 million, versus a net loss of $427.3 million in the same period last year. 

Lyft executives Tuesday said the company remains cautiously optimistic that revenue growth for 2022 will accelerate and that demand will increase in the second half of the year. Demand remains around only 70 percent of where it was at the end of 2019, before the onset of the pandemic.

Company executives said Lyft would be investing more in driver incentives as it looks to bring numbers back to pre-pandemic levels but did not provide details on how much the company would be spending on the efforts to boost the number of drivers. 

Uber reported a revenue growth of 136 percent from the same period last year, up to $6.9 billion. 

The company reported a net loss of $5.9 billion. That included $5.6 billion from investments such as losses related to investments in other companies, including the Chinese company Didi.