Uber’s $14 ride problem in Nigeria

Uber spent 12 years in Nigeria and decided to leave because the market it operated in could not deliver the economies of scale required to support its future ambitions.

In 2025, Uber recorded $193.45 billion in gross bookings from 13.57 billion trips globally, according to its financial results. That works out to an average of $14.26 per reported trip.

The problem for Uber was not necessarily that Nigeria lacked demand. The value of that demand may not have been high enough to justify the investment required to continue operations. Nigerian rides were significantly cheaper than the global average Uber trip, while riders were becoming more price-sensitive, drivers were facing higher operating costs, and competition was keeping pressure on fares.

The $14 ride

Uber’s definition of gross bookings means the total dollar value, including any applicable taxes, tolls, and fees, of mobility rides, delivery orders (in each case without any adjustment for consumer discounts and refunds, driver and merchant earnings, and driver incentives), and freight revenue.

So, $14.26 is the average global gross bookings per reported trip across the three segments. Uber’s mobility rides and delivery orders were offered in Nigeria. But what did a Nigerian Uber ride look like in comparison to this?

Oluwasegun Peter, a maths graduate who recently started driving for Uber, told TechCabal that he earned *₦44,000 ($30.65) across six trips on Monday after driving for eight hours. That is about ₦7,333 ($5.11) per trip.

One of the drivers TechCabal spoke to for a video interview explained that while an hour of ride-sharing with competitors like Bolt and inDrive in Lagos can generate between ₦12,500 ($8.71) and ₦13,000 ($9.05), on Uber it can be ₦9,000 ($6.27), highlighting how the platform was more economical for riders.

Another driver interviewed by TechCabal in 2025 said he earned around ₦350,000 ($243.77) in a typical weekend from about 35 trips, averaging roughly ₦10,000 ($6.97) per trip.

These figures are gross driver earnings, rather than Uber’s reported fares or gross bookings, so they are not directly comparable to the $14.26 global figure. But they indicate the value of an individual trip in Nigeria before commissions and other charges are deducted.

At ₦7,333 to ₦10,000, that is roughly $5.11 to $6.97 per trip, before commissions and other deductibles. That is less than half of Uber’s global average gross bookings per reported trip.

Data Interactive

The Scale of a Low-Value Ride

Uber’s global model relies on an average gross booking value of $14.26 per trip. Enter a local fare below to see how many Nigerian rides it takes to equal a single global trip.

Average Nigerian Fare: ₦ Gross Booking Value: $6.97 (at ₦1,435.76/$) 2.0× Nigerian rides needed to equal the gross booking value of one global-average Uber trip. Global Target (1 Ride) $14.26 Nigerian Volume Requirement Matches $14.26

A lower-value ride puts immense pressure on volume. For Uber, this means the Nigerian market had to generate extreme transaction density just to compensate for the smaller value of each trip.

Explore Scenarios: ₦5k ₦7.5k ₦10k ₦15k Global benchmark: $14.26 gross bookings per trip based on Uber’s 2025 financial reporting. FX conversion: ₦1,435.76/$. ×

A low-value ride is not necessarily a bad ride for Uber. Ride-hailing is a volume business, and a platform can make low-value rides work if it has enough trips, enough demand density, and enough utilisation.

The problem is when relatively low-value rides are combined with high operating costs and intense competition.

How big was Uber in Nigeria?

Uber launched in Lagos in 2014 and expanded to 11 other Nigerian cities. By July 2016, just two years after launch, the company said it had completed more than one million trips in Lagos.

Its one-millionth trip was from Yaba to Lekki, and Uber said those trips had covered about nine million kilometres, averaging nine kilometres per trip. It had transported 10,417 people by then.

Since then, however, Uber has not disclosed Nigeria-specific trip volumes. In 2022, it said it had completed 1 billion rides across all its markets in Africa: South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Côte d’Ivoire.

This makes it difficult to determine exactly how large the Nigerian business became or how much money flowed through the platform. In 2023, Public First, a public policy research agency, reported that drivers earned an additional ₦6.1 billion ($4.25 million) in higher income through Uber, and that the platform contributed ₦34 billion ($23.68 million) to the Nigerian economy in 2023 alone.

But another ride-hailing company gives a sense of the market’s scale.

In August 2023, Bolt said it had completed more than 250 million rides on its platform since it entered Nigeria in 2016. It also said those rides had covered more than three billion kilometres.

Over seven years, this amounted to an average of 35.7 million rides per year, or roughly 98,000 per day. Three billion kilometres divided by 250 million rides gives an average of about 12 kilometres per ride.

According to a June 2024 report by Sagaci Research, an Africa-focused data and analytics firm, ride-hailing users surveyed in Nigeria said 58% had used Bolt, and 34% had used Uber.

The figures are not a measure of each company’s share of total rides, so they cannot definitively tell how many trips Uber completed. But they can be used to build a rough estimate of the possible scale of Uber’s business.

If, purely as an approximation, Bolt’s 35.7 million annual rides represented the 58% share reported by Sagaci, then 100% of the market would translate to about 61.55 million rides.

At 34%, Uber’s share translates to roughly 20.93 million rides a year.

If those 20.93 million trips were each worth roughly $6.97—the higher end of the driver earnings examples above—that would imply about $145.9 million in annual transaction value.

That would be only about 0.075% of Uber’s 2025 gross bookings of $193.45 billion.

This is not Uber’s reported revenue or gross earnings in Nigeria. But even as a rough illustration, it shows that Nigeria might have been a sizeable ride-hailing market without being a particularly large one for Uber.

And if the value of each transaction was low, the platform needed enormous volume and density to make the economics work. Without that scale, continuing to operate the market became harder to justify.

Not just Nigeria

Despite being one of Africa’s largest economies, Nigeria has faced macroeconomic pressures since 2023 that have put pressure on the ride-hailing market.

Falling income levels have affected riders, while high fuel costs following the removal of the petrol subsidy have squeezed drivers.

For many drivers, Uber was already an option because of its 25% commission, but many preferred competitors that offered higher returns.

When Uber announced its decision to discontinue operations in Nigeria, it also added Uganda, saying the move followed a review of its evolving business priorities and investment focus across Africa.

The company now operates in Egypt, Ghana, Kenya and South Africa, and, to a limited extent, Morocco. Since last year, it has also departed Côte d’Ivoire and Tanzania.

“We remain committed to Sub-Saharan Africa, where we continue to see strong growth and opportunity,” an Uber spokesperson said. “We are focusing our investments on markets where we believe we can add the most value for drivers by providing earning opportunities at scale and enabling riders to go anywhere seamlessly.”

While the company said Africa is still part of its plan, it might not be achieving the scale it needs in many of its operating markets on the continent and is choosing to concentrate its investment in markets where the economics can support that scale.

Nigeria may have potential riders, with 58% of its 230 million people under 30. Still, if the value of each ride is relatively low, competition is intense, and operating costs are rising, the question becomes whether the market generates enough value for Uber to keep investing in it.

Uber is also betting on a different future. The company cut about 3,300 roles, roughly 10% of its workforce, as it reduced management layers and reallocated spending toward its ride-sharing, delivery, and autonomous vehicle businesses.

The ride-hailing company sees autonomous vehicles as a big part of its future.

“Having learned from our AV deployments thus far, we are even more convinced that AVs will unlock a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity for Uber. Autonomy fundamentally amplifies the strengths of our existing platform: global scale, deep demand density, sophisticated marketplace technology, and decades of experience matching millions of trips in real time,” it said in February 2026.

Uber said it had committed more than $10 billion to robotaxi partnerships in the coming years as it seeks to transform its service into the go-to platform for hailing an autonomous vehicle.

The service is already live in seven cities, with an additional eight planned by the end of 2026, and none planned for Africa.

Nigeria does not currently have the infrastructure, road network, or other conditions required to support autonomous vehicles at scale. The country is still in the early stages of adopting electric vehicles.

The country is still further away from the future Uber is currently investing heavily to build, with autonomous vehicles fundamentally changing the economics of Uber’s business.

Today, Uber’s platform connects a passenger to a driver who owns or operates the vehicle.

In the autonomous model, the vehicle enters the economic equation differently, with the driver playing a lesser role and Uber’s technology playing a more important role.

Any market that can provide dense, predictable demand and supporting infrastructure will be important to Uber’s future.

Uber’s exit from Nigeria may therefore point less to a company abandoning Africa and more to a company becoming more selective about where it deploys capital.

Nigeria may have potential, but it is a market built around relatively low-value rides that require enormous volume and density to achieve attractive economics. At the same time, Uber is directing more capital towards autonomous vehicles and markets where it believes its platform can operate at greater scale.

For Uber, the question was not whether people needed rides; it was whether those rides could generate enough value to justify the cost of serving them, and whether the market could support the future Uber is trying to build.

****Exchange rate as of December 31, 2025: *****$1 = ₦1,435.7571

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