Pony.ai Beats EPS Forecast While Uber Partners with Zipline for Drone Deliveries

Pony.ai posted a quarterly loss but beat earnings per share expectations, reporting a ($0.10) EPS versus the consensus ($0.15) and showing a negative 17.13% return on equity. Meanwhile, Uber announced a partnership with Zipline to scale drone deliveries, targeting one million drops per day by 2029. Pony.ai also outlined an aggressive robotaxi rollout, planning over 4,000 vehicles abroad, including 2,000 in Europe.

PONY reported a quarterly loss of $0.10 per share, narrower than the $0.15 loss analysts expected, alongside a return on equity of -17.13% and a net margin of -128.22% . The beat is real but the margin figures frame it correctly: this is a company still spending far ahead of revenue, and a smaller loss is progress on burn rate rather than evidence of an approaching profitability inflection.

The operating news is expansion. Pony.ai disclosed a pipeline of more than 4,000 autonomous vehicles earmarked for international deployment, including a specific plan for 2,000 robotaxis in Europe. Europe is the harder regulatory environment of the two large Western markets, so the size of that commitment is a statement about where the company expects approval timelines to land rather than a near-term revenue schedule.

In a separate development the same week, UBER disclosed a partnership with drone logistics firm Zipline targeting one million drone deliveries per day by the end of 2029 for Uber Eats. The two stories are independent but rhyme: both are bets that autonomy moves last-mile delivery economics from labor-cost-driven to capital-cost-driven.

For Pony.ai the metric to track is cost per autonomous mile against fleet growth, since scaling a loss-making unit economic multiplies the loss. For Uber the question is what share of Eats volume is actually addressable by drone given payload and weather constraints, which will determine whether the 2029 target is a roadmap or a ceiling.

Related Stocks

UBER