Uber’s ROIC went from -5% to 28% in five years. Ran the fundamentals and I think the market is still sleeping on it

I've been running stocks through a personal fundamental screen looking for businesses where the quality story hasn't fully shown up in the price yet. Uber came up and honestly the turnaround numbers are pretty striking.

Here's what the screen showed:

ROIC: 27.8% (5yr average was -5.1% – this thing was burning cash for years)

Gross margin: 38.5%

Net margin: 19.3%

Revenue CAGR 5yr: 29%

FCF margin: 12.2%

P/E: 16.3x

Fair value estimate (DCF): ~$129

Current price: ~$75

The ROIC flip is the story here. Five years ago Uber was losing money on almost every dollar it reinvested. Today it's generating 28 cents of return on every dollar. That's not a small improvement, that's a fundamentally different business.

And yet the stock is trading at 16x earnings which is honestly pretty undemanding for a company growing revenue at 29% a year with improving margins. My model puts fair value around $129, which is a wide gap from current prices.

A few things worth knowing before Q1 earnings on May 6:

The most recent quarter showed 200 million monthly active users completing over 40 million trips a day. Gross bookings hit $193 billion for full year 2025 and free cash flow came in at $10 billion. These are not struggling business numbers.

The autonomous vehicle angle is also interesting. Uber has been positioning itself as the distribution layer for AV trips rather than a competitor to the AV companies themselves. Partnerships with Waymo and others mean that as self-driving scales, Uber potentially benefits rather than gets disrupted. That's a different narrative than most people have in their heads about this company.

The main concerns I'm sitting with are gross margin at 38.5% which is low compared to pure software but makes more sense in the context of a marketplace business. And the AV angle cuts both ways as the AV companies can decide to build their own consumer apps rather than partner.

Curious if anyone here has been following Uber closely. Is the 16x P/E justified by the AV disruption risk or does the platform moat hold up regardless of who owns the cars?