After 12 years of operating in Nigeria, Uber decided to leave, concluding that the market 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 in Nigeria was not necessarily a lack of demand. Rather, the value of that demand may not have been high enough to justify the investment required to keep operating. Nigerian rides were significantly cheaper than the global average Uber trip, riders were growing more price-sensitive, drivers faced higher operating costs, and intense competition kept pressure on fares. The naira's sharp depreciation since 2023 also shrank the dollar value of naira-denominated fares, widening the gap between Nigerian trips and Uber's global average.

The $14 ride

Under Uber's definition, 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. The $14.26 figure is therefore the average global gross bookings per reported trip across those three segments. Uber's mobility rides and delivery orders were both offered in Nigeria. So what did a Nigerian Uber ride look like by comparison?

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

One driver TechCabal interviewed for a video 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), underscoring 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 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—roughly $5.11 to $6.97 per trip before commissions and deductibles—that is less than half of Uber's global average gross bookings per reported trip.

The scale of a low-value ride

Uber's global model relies on an average gross booking value of $14.26 per trip. A lower-value ride puts immense pressure on volume. For Uber, the Nigerian market would have had to generate extreme transaction density simply to compensate for the smaller value of each trip.

A low-value ride is not necessarily a bad ride. 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 arises 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 ran from Yaba to Lekki, and Uber said those trips had covered about nine million kilometres, averaging nine kilometres per trip, and had transported 10,417 people.

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

Another ride-hailing company, however, offers a sense of the market's scale. In August 2023, Bolt said it had completed more than 250 million rides on its platform since entering Nigeria in 2016, covering more than three billion kilometres. Over seven years, that averages 35.7 million rides per year, or roughly 98,000 per day. Dividing three billion kilometres 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. These figures do not measure each company's share of total rides, so they cannot definitively show how many trips Uber completed, but they can support a rough estimate.

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 would be 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, 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 suggests Nigeria may 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 in 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 weighed 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 a less attractive option because of its 25% commission, and many preferred competitors offering 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 the previous year, it has also exited 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 remains part of its plan, it may not be achieving the scale it needs in many of its operating markets on the continent, and is choosing to concentrate investment where the economics can support that scale.

Nigeria has no shortage of potential riders—58% of its 230 million people are under 30, per Afrobarometer. 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.

A different future

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 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," Uber 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, and the country is still in the early stages of adopting electric vehicles. It remains far from the future Uber is investing heavily to build, one in which autonomous vehicles fundamentally change 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 one. 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 toward autonomous vehicles and markets where it believes its platform can operate at greater scale. For Nigerian riders and drivers, competitors such as Bolt and inDrive—already the more widely used platforms by some measures—remain active in the market, and the exit consolidates demand around them.

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 (CBN)