Uber retreats from key African markets

Uber is cutting about 3 300 jobs, roughly a tenth of its global headcount, in a restructuring designed to flatten its management hierarchy and concentrate resources on three things: ride-hailing, delivery and autonomous vehicles. The number of managers is being slashed by 20%.

On the same day it announced the cuts, the company closed its operations in Nigeria and Uganda, ending a 12-year presence in Africa’s most populous country and a decade in Uganda.

CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told staff that years of growth had introduced “more layers, more coordination, more fragmented ownership, and in some cases structures that made sense when businesses were smaller but no longer serve us well at our current scale”.

The savings, he said, would be reinvested in growth and innovation. The restructuring roughly halves the number of one- and two-person micro-teams, cuts by a fifth the share of staff sitting more than seven levels from the CEO, folds the separate restaurant, retail and white-label delivery units into a single global, regional and local structure, and caps remote work at about 1% of the workforce. Headcount falls to just under 30 000, roughly where it stood in 2021.

“After a thorough review of our business, we have made the tough decision to wind down our operations in Nigeria, effective 2 September 2026,” the company told users. Ugandan customers received an almost identical notice.

The two closures leave Uber in four African markets – South Africa, Kenya, Ghana and Egypt. It withdrew from Côte d’Ivoire in 2025 and from Tanzania in February , making these the third and fourth exits on the continent inside two years. Uber’s African footprint has halved in that time.

The company was at pains to say the retreat stops there. “This decision is limited strictly to these two markets and does not impact our operations across the rest of the continent,” a spokesman said. “Uber remains deeply committed to sub-Saharan Africa, where we continue to see robust growth and long-term opportunity.”

What makes this round different from Uber’s pandemic-era retrenchments is that the core business is growing. Gross bookings reached US$58-billion in the quarter to 30 June , up 24% year on year, on revenue of $14.2-billion. These are not cuts forced by a shrinking top line. Rather, they are a decision about where the company wants to spend.

The three areas Uber is concentrating on explain the African decisions better than local market conditions do. The company has pivoted hard towards autonomous robo-taxis and has committed more than $10-billion to autonomous vehicle partnerships, with capital directed into Avride, Lucid, Nuro and Rivian.

This is a capital-intensive bet that pays off only in dense, high-value markets with the regulatory clearance to run driverless fleets. On delivery, it moved on Delivery Hero in July in a deal that handed Prosus a R40-billion exit. Neither strategy has much use for a market of price-sensitive riders and thin margins.

Uber does not break out country-level results for its African markets, so the revenue effect of the two exits is not disclosed.