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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."
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.