Uber’s largest shareholder has called for the car-booking company to focus on recovering market share in the US and growing in key European markets, a strategy that would end the founders’ original vision of building a transport service “everywhere, for everyone”.

Rajeev Misra, a board director of Japanese technology conglomerate SoftBank — which becomes Uber’s biggest shareholder on Thursday, with the formal closing of an $8.8bn investment — told the Financial Times that the transportation group had a faster path to profitability if it returned to its core markets such as the US, Europe, Latin America and Australia.

Mr Misra, who will join Uber’s board as part of the deal, insisted that exiting unprofitable countries was not solely about cutting its losses, which hit $1.5bn in the third quarter of 2017, but that growth prospects were more promising in its core markets.