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Uber Is Selling Its Money-Losing Car Lease Business (engadget.com)
According to The Wall Street Journal, Uber is selling its Xchange Leasing unit to the car marketplace Fair.com. "It reportedly won't be a clean break," reports Engadget. "Uber will both take a stake in Fair and point would-be drivers to the site through its app. Fair, in return, will offer jobs to roughly 150 workers affected by the switch. Other companies in the running had included Avis Budget Group (yes, the car rental agency), activist investor Carl Icahn's self-titled Icahn Enterprises, Innovate Auto Finance and two capital investment firms."
they should go back to their core business Values
I wonder if Uber is making money on anything because the numbers I saw say they lost nearly three billion dollars last year and I doubt this does much to improve the situation.
Lesing a car is practically no different than renting it. And all of the big rental companies have fleet sales departments.
Leasing cars is a financial transaction so one sided that if you are a leasor and lose money you suck at business.
I wonder if Uber is making money on anything
Their mission is not to make money.
Their mission is to keep drawing in investment money from venture capitalists.
The investment money eventually gets converted into juicy salaries for the Über executives. If Über finally does go bust, they will still have made fortunes for themselves during the run.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Damn, I see no victims in this scam. No human ones anyhow.
You'd think the VCs would force it public and let em roll. Must be distracted fighting over a nice juicy roadkill.
Nice job 'redistributing the wealth', Uber guys.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Their mission is to keep drawing in investment money from venture capitalists.
Don't forget the pyramid.
The venture capitalists themselves are hoping to sell off after an IPO.
A lot of leases are bad deals. AND if car leasing was a guaranteed way to make good money for anyone good at business, everyone good at business would start leasing cars.
Industry profits are self-regulating that way. If one industry has high profits and low risk, more companies will enter that market. More competition drives down prices and profits. Note that's true of profitable *industries*, not *companies*. One company might just be really good at what they do and make a nice profit.
The thing about offering leases that are really bad deals for consumers is that people who sign up for a bad lease are people who make bad decisions. Which means the leasing company is loaning brand new cars to people who make bad decisions. You can imagine how that could create problems for the owner of the cars, the leasing company.
If you give a certain number of Lyft rides it can be free with lyft's leasing plan.
Uber was about locking people in and then changing the pay rates.
There next round of funding is supposedly a down round. Like, half of the value assigned to Uber by the last investors has been lost.
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The longer Uber can continue to operate at a loss, the more legitimate competitors they can drive out of business.
It's almost impossible for legitimate businesses, constrained to make a regular profit, to compete against VC-owned companies. The latter are financed indirectly by fedgov's "quantitative easing" program, wherein the gubmint gives billions of dollars of free money to well-connected oligarchs.
I've never heard of fair.com. But based on their name I can only assume they're in the business of cheating people.