Lyft is seeing business grow at a faster rate compared to Uber as of the second quarter of 2017, according to a new report from Bloomberg. While Uber has typically been a top performer in the ride-sharing industry maintaining a healthy lead over Lyft for much of the time that both companies have been in business, things are starting to shift now in terms of growth, as Lyft’s second quarter bookings revenue is said to be above the $1 billion mark. Though Uber’s gross bookings for the second quarter of the year are higher than Lyft’s by a sizeable margin, said to be at around $8.25 billion, according to the report this results in a slower growth rate than Lyft from quarter to quarter.
Lyft’s driver-generated revenue from bookings in the first quarter of 2017 was recorded at just over $800 million, which means the revenue that it’s been gaining from bookings has grown to around $200 million more at this point than it was for the first three months of the year. Uber is still at a positive growth point in its business from bookings as well, but its slowed pace for the growth rate should be significant considering that Uber operates on a global scale whereas Lyft only operates within the U.S. Moreover, it’s reported that a number of both drivers and riders seem to prefer Lyft to Uber, though the exact number of drivers who had this preference wasn’t mentioned. However, riders are another thing entirely as about 500,000 riders reportedly deleted the Uber application from their mobile devices within the first couple of months of the year.
Speaking about Lyft’s recent successes, its company’s CFO Brian Roberts says that Lyft’s growth has been “incredible” so far in 2017, and that it expects this forward and upward momentum to continue through the remainder of the year. Despite positive growth though for both Lyft and Uber, both companies have also reported a fair amount of losses for Q1, with Lyft having an expected loss of about $130 million, which is quite a bit lower than Uber’s reported loss for the same period of about $708 million, though it’s also worth noting that Uber also generated more revenue so it’s losses would understandably be higher. Lyft has been making every effort to compete with Uber on every possible front, introducing similar features for both Drivers and Riders. Lyft has also been cooking up features to keep riders interested, like its recently added Taco Mode, a feature which aims to add a tasty stop for passengers on the way their final destination.