MW DoorDash users want more complex deliveries, and that's hitting profits
By Bill Peters
Fourth-quarter sales results and first-quarter profit forecast miss estimates
DoorDash reported quarterly earnings on Wednesday, with profit beating expectations but sales missing the mark.
DoorDash on Wednesday offered up an outlook on profitability that came in below Wall Street's expectations, as the takeout and retail delivery platform prepares for a bigger year of investing in technology to support more complex delivery operations.
Shares fell 2.9% after hours on Wednesday, after jumping 6.8% during the regular trading session.
For the first quarter, DoorDash forecast adjusted Ebitda - or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization - of $675 million to $775 million. That was below analyst expectations for $801.9 million, according to FactSet.
Management said investments in Deliveroo, the London-based delivery platform that DoorDash bought last year, and some recent harsh winter storms weighed on that adjusted profit forecast. So did higher costs for longer-distance deliveries and more complicated delivery tasks, like those that involve picking up multiple items from grocery stores.
DoorDash said it expects marketplace gross order value - a gauge of the total dollar value of things ordered on the platform - of $31 billion to $31.8 billion for the first quarter. That was above Wall Street's forecasts for $30.75 billion.
DoorDash earned 48 cents a share during the fourth quarter, up from 33 cents a share a year ago but below FactSet estimates for 59 cents. Revenue grew 37.7% to $3.96 billion but missed expectations for $3.99 billion. Marketplace gross order value jumped 39% year over year to $29.7 billion, above estimates for $29.17 billion.
Shares of DoorDash have dropped 18.2% over the past 12 months through Wednesday's close. The stock closed Friday at a 15-month low.
The company reported the results as it expands abroad through acquisitions and moves beyond restaurant deliveries and into other areas of retail. However, it has faced greater competition from big e-commerce players like Walmart $(WMT)$ and Amazon (AMZN), as well as apps like Instacart $(CART)$.
As DoorDash gets bigger, it has become more complex, and management has been taking steps to make the different companies under its umbrella work in harmony. Along with syncing up its technological infrastructure, DoorDash has invested in other new features, like autonomous delivery vehicles, artificial intelligence and restaurant reservations.
In November, DoorDash said it expects to invest several hundred million dollars more in "new initiatives and platform development" in 2026 than it did in 2025.
In a letter to shareholders on Wednesday, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu said the company currently runs systems across three different tech platforms at DoorDash, Deliveroo and Wolt, a delivery platform in Finland that DoorDash bought in 2022. While he said rolling those together into a single system would be a huge task, he tried to project optimism about the company overall.
"This is a massive and expensive undertaking and honestly one you shouldn't do if you thought your best days were behind you," he said.
"On the contrary, one of the lessons we've learned in building DoorDash is that to build systems that endure, you must also think and invest in the long term," he said. "That means sometimes you have to start over."
-Bill Peters
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February 18, 2026 16:30 ET (21:30 GMT)
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