The IPO price for Uber stock was $45.00 per share.
The current price of Uber stock is $31.71 per share.
Anyone who bought at the IPO price is severely under water.
I remember some analysts have said that Uber is not a viable long term business, and that accounts for why its stock had consistently slid down so much from the IPO.
I wonder if the virus crisis is just magnifying problems with the Uber business model?
For Uber ride sharing may no longer be the main impetus of their business. Their software can enable the gig economy in a big way. They could get into courier services, local emergency shipments, repair services, etc. There are a lot of business opportunities for their software platform.
Very possible. I have a family member who owned a mini fleet of yellow cabs in NYC and then the city completely devalued medallions through its policies and made the price plunge. And people couldn’t even sell them because they had gone from a million dollars to nearly worthless. That’s why cabbies, a lot of them immigrants investing in the American dream of owning a business, were committing suicide a couple of years ago.
It was partially also because of the advent of the so-called ride sharing, although in reality not a lot of people shared their rides and most people called them the way you’d call a cab. Hailing was the only thing that even kept yellow cabs alive.
A lot of the more successful cabbies then started driving for Uber, especially in the black car service.
The big failure of the taxi industry was that they were completely out of the loop on basic things such as mobile phone apps and connections, while modern companies such as Uber and Lyft knew how to do this. Yellow cab drivers, even though theoretically licensed, also did not know the city, half the time the photo on the license looked nothing like the driver and they were crazy drivers. This was particularly true during a period where there were a lot of African drivers - not medallion owners, just friends of somebody related to the person who had leased the cab....and they drive as if they were on a dirt road in Africa. But this was NYC.
So the taxi industry had a lot of problems, but so does Uber. Some of the drivers are very sketchy (I had one show up with her entire family in the backseat, and I was supposed to sit with them) and a lot of them don’t know the city and don’t seem to be able to use GPS.
So there’s probably a lot of factors involved in the drop in clientele.