Honest question, does Uber need that much R&D? And do they expect the ROI to be positive?

i assume this also includes their self driving vehicle research and trucking, not just their consumer mobile app dev

Imagine making your product compliant across 100+ countries while regulatiions, labor-laws, tax rules, insurance requirements, and data privacy laws keep changing.

Imagine itegrating dozens of payment methods - many of them highly localized - across emerging and developed markets, while dealing with fraud, chargebacks, KYC, AML, and settlement complexities.

Imagine processing trillions of data points every day - rides, location updates, pricing signals, ETAs, traffic conditions, demand forecasts, payments, support events.... storing it efficiently, querying it in near real time, generating reports, and keeping the whole pipeline reliable. I have woorked in data engineering, and can tell you confidently that this alone requires an enormous R&d budget.

Then there are the apps - not just customer-facing, but driver-facing, courier-facing, merchant-facing, fleet-management, onboarding, support, operations, compliance, finance, and hundreds of internal tools and dashboards.

Then come the integrations. Companies running at Uber's scale genemrally have hundreds of tjese - mapping providers, payment processors, banks, identity verification, tax systems, telecoms, customer support platforms, fraud detection, analytics, ERP, CRM, and more.

... And then there are even more...

Real-time routing and dispatch optimization

Dynamic pricing and marketplace balancing

Fraud detection and account security

Driver/rider safety systems

ML models for ETA, demand forecasting, incentives, and churn prevention

Experimentation infrastructure for thousands of A/B tests

Reliability engineering across globally distributed systems

Data centers / cloud optimization at massive scale

Localization across languages, currencies, addresses, and cultural norms

Customer support automation at global scale

Autonomous vehicle research, mapping, and computer vision

... to be fair, this is all what I could thing of based on my own work experience in related fields... there is definitely as many more systems in reality as mentioned abpve.