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Uber Loses At Least $1.2 Billion In First Half of 2016 (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The ride-hailing giant Uber Technologies Inc. is not a public company, but every three months, dozens of shareholders get on a conference call to hear the latest details on its business performance from its head of finance, Gautam Gupta. On Friday, Gupta told investors that Uber's losses mounted in the second quarter. Even in the U.S., where Uber had turned a profit during its first quarter, the company was once again losing money. In the first quarter of this year, Uber lost about $520 million before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, according to people familiar with the matter. In the second quarter the losses significantly exceeded $750 million, including a roughly $100 million shortfall in the U.S., those people said. That means Uber's losses in the first half of 2016 totalled at least $1.27 billion. "It's hardly rare for companies to lose large sums of money as they try to build significant markets and battle for market share," said Joe Grundfest, professor of law and business at Stanford. "The interesting challenge is for them to turn the corner to become profitable, cash-flow-positive entities."
How is this a related link "10 Confirmed Dead In Shooting at Oregon's Umpqua Community College" to every article I look at, even this one?
At least, they need to stop letting people to give free ride codes to themselves. In Russia, we coined a word "Uberist" for people who chain Uber promo codes or ride and hail themselves from the second phone.
get rid of the drivers and their cars and move to their own self driven vehicles
This is the thing that a lot of people quote as being the thing that will help Uber turn the corner but if anything it'll make turning a profit that much more difficult. As it currently stands Uber is deferring a lot of business costs to drivers. Things like equipment, insurance, fuel, repair, and so on. When they have their own fleet of self driving cars, they take on all of those things that they haven't been paying for. Not only that, depending on the regulation a state/city might have for self driving cars, there might be a very high cost associated with self driving taxis. Yes, Philadelphia is all too happy to jump on, but that's because of the novelty. Years from now when it goes mundane, I'm pretty sure governments will be less affable to companies wanting to have a lot of self driving autos crowding their streets wearing down their roads. Switching over to self driving isn't going to be this panacea that allows them to go crazy insane profitable, there's a lot of costs involved and Uber will have to switch (or pivot since that's the fun word this season) from being just a purely service based company to a more complex company altogether. Pair with that, the ever evolving attitude of governments that will ultimately wane as time marches on, with ever increasing expectations from locals. If they don't have that mental change happen early in the game as they go self driving, they won't last long. I've seen tons of companies try automation and them not fully understanding what they're getting into is a killer (worst case)/hindrance (best case) for most of them.
I'll add this, what Uber wants to do is of a scale that I've never dealt with personally, so something this large might have totally different challenges and I'm just talking out my butt. So that said, take all the above with grains of salt. But I do think that those are rationale challenges that they're going to run into down the road which will prevent them from being insta-profitable the second a robot hits the street.
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is worth over $6 billion. The loss belongs strictly to the investors. The company's doing fine, otherwise.
This is why Uber is not a public company. It's a money laundering operation.
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/03/28...
http://investorplace.com/ipo-p...
You are welcome on my lawn.