Uber Eats Struggles To Maintain Traction Internationally

Uber Eats, the food delivery service, has seen downloads for its flagship app drop by 50% since 2020.

Does everyone have the app already? Are the rest not hungry? Not lazy?

Let's take a closer look at downloads.

Uber Eats started 202 with 1.6M weekly downloads, according to our estimates. That's quite a nice number, and it isn't even the peak for Uber Eats. That came during the early days of lockdowns, when Uber Eats peaked at 2M weekly downloads.

But if we take out that spike, it's clear downloads have been on a downward slope. By the end of 2020, pandemic and lockdowns and all, downloads dropped to 1.3M. By the end of 2021, the figure downloads dropped to 1M, and by 2022 things stabilized a bit and downloads dropped just a bit more to around 900K. It dipped even lower last week.

Why? Pre pandemic, Uber Eats was mostly free for users. There were no delivery fees by restaurants or black box fees charged by Uber. The consistent decrease in downloads could be a result of that.

But there's another way to look at this - countries.

Uber Eats operates in and out of the US, and most of its downloads don't come from the US. Japan, the UK, Brazil, and Mexico are also big for Uber Eats. Not a single country is larger than the US, but together they are - in terms of downloads, that is.

Although downloads in the US have dropped this year they have been fairly consistent before. The main drop for Uber Eats comes from Mexico and Brazil, where downloads dropped 60% and 90%, respectively.

Since 2020, Uber Eats saw 14.4M downloads in Brazil, 16.1M in Mexico, and 57.3M in the US. I expect to see more focus on the US as other markets become more challenging.

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