Posted on 08/14/2019 7:29:51 AM PDT by C19fan
Uber set two dubious quarterly records on Thursday as it reported its results: its largest-ever loss, exceeding $5 billion, and its slowest-ever revenue growth.
The double whammy immediately renewed questions about the prospects for the company, the world’s biggest ride-hailing business. Uber has been dogged by concerns about sluggish sales and whether it can make money, worries that were compounded by a disappointing initial public offering in May.
For the second quarter, Uber said it lost $5.2 billion, the largest loss since it began disclosing limited financial data in 2017. A majority of that — about $3.9 billion — was caused by stock-based compensation that Uber paid its employees after its I.P.O.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Uber makes real the saying about making up losses with volume.
Just like Tesla.
agree....but the computers aren’t quite yet good enough to make it happen
I don’t think this is a real “loss.”
Cash on hand, as I understand it, went up by nearly the same amount.
Uh, I thought I heard they put a hiring freeze on engineers at uber. HUH?
Is Uber a viable business going forward? Will they ever turn a profit on their business of giving rides to people? Is the Uber Eats product line going to generate big revenues?
How can they sustain such losses?
And as for investors, if you bought in at the IPO price of $45.00 per share, you are way underwater. Their stock price right now is $34.82.
Meh. We prefer Lyft anyway.
I don't see how those things will improve profitability.
The Wright brothers are the first to fly in a powered airplane. That being said, nobody flies in a Wright built plane today.
And then there’s MySpace.
Being first doesn’t mean you’ll survive.
The computers are quite capable.
The field work, and programming are the issue.
The MCAS system on the Boeing super max was programmed wrong.
$4.2 Billion of the 5.2 is a one time thing that was expected. The media is hyping this. I would buy uber on the fake news.
Like several high profile entities that claim huge looses yet years pass and they are big as ever. XM comes to mind supposedly they lose every year but they are still in every new car. TIVO is another. I am sure other posters can think of more.
Why don’t they just raise prices 25%? They are in an effective monopoly with Lyft and if they both raised prices, they market would have no choice but to accept it.
Of course, they are somehow relying on the hope they can continue to “steal” riders from other areas - whether public transit, taxis (already maxed out) or people’s own cars.
They can either continue to live this fantasy and eventually go bankrupt, or admit their model is wrong and only is supported by cheap Fed money, and try to survive.
Even if (and autonomous driving is at least 2 decades away, no matter what snake oil you are being told) autonomous driving comes to be... they still have no future.
Autonomous vehicles will instantly commoditize their entire business model.
UBER is where you throw money when you like to watch it burn.. its completely built on the bigger fool theory, and a lot of fools are making a lot of douchebags rich.
It’s not obvious how those things will improve profitability, is it?
Putting more people in a vehicle means a lower price per passenger. I want to get from A to B without having to stop at D, E, and F. I used to HATE airport shared rides that did that, but I used them because they were so much cheaper than a private car straight to the airport. I expect a deep discount if you make me stop at D, E and F on the way to my destination.
Being first doesn’t mean you’ll survive.
A friend and I were talking about one of the first pocket calculators, the “Bowmar Brain”. We each had one of those decades ago. The Bowmar company is long out of business. So I see your point.
Amazon the grand-daddy of that. As of two years ago, Amazon had posted just a handful of profitable quarters in its two-decade history. Yet it was the fourth-largest public company at almost $470 billion in market capitalization. That’s from a Forbes article in May 2017. I don’t think it has changed much in the past two years.
Try to buy an IBM PC with VisiCalc today.
It really is astonishing how fast entire industries are created, innovators get clobbered and turn to dust, the industry rises, the products become commoditized, cheap knock-offs arrive from China, then the early winners drop out.
You’d think this would take a long time to happen, but it happens within 20 or 30 years. I’ve seen many such cycles in my 68 years.
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