You will find more infographics at Statista
Uber filed for its highly-anticipated IPO on Thursday, providing the general public with a first glimpse of its explosive growth and piling losses.
According to the filing, Uber had 91 million monthly active users by the end of last year. Gross bookings from ridesharing trips and Uber Eats meal deliveries amounted to $49.8 billion in 2018, up from $34.4 billion in 2017 and $19.2 billion the year before that. After paying nearly $40 billion to drivers and restaurants, the company’s actual cut is much smaller than that though, with net revenue amounting to $11.3 billion in 2018. Total costs and expenses, including direct costs of revenue as well as operating expenses, sales and marketing costs, R&D spending and general and administrative costs, amounted to $14.3 billion, however, leaving the company with an operating loss of $3 billion in 2018.
Speaking of losses, the market leader in the ridesharing space amassed operating losses in excess of $12 billion since 2014, making it the king of loss-making tech unicorns. Even Amazon, infamous for losing money in its early years, never piled up losses at a rate even remotely close to Uber’s. And yet, the company based in San Francisco is expected to seek a valuation of more than $100 billion in its upcoming IPO. Lyft, Uber’s similarly loss-laden main competitor in the United States, went public at a valuation of $24 billion in late March. Its shares are currently trading 15 percent below the IPO price, however, leaving many people wondering whether the same will happen to Uber.
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RELATED NEWS: High Operating Expenses, Low Wages Force Uber Drivers to Apply New Strategies for Survival
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woon,
you’re a busy bee tonight–i hope you get rich & then have it all taken from you in a scam of a hyped ipo —
Being a Unicorn isn’t actually about anything but the very rare ability to lose billions of dollars while indirectly acquiring other peoples money to pay billions of dollars for said Unicorn. Unicorns seem to be (the vast majority, anyway) a wealth transfer and centralization mechanism.
How easy it would be to start and run a business – any business – if I could sell 4 dollars worth of stuff while losing 1 or 2 dollars on the sale – and do that on every sale to the tune of 10’s of billions for years on end. With that model anyone with a brain could, in short order, gobble up every market on the planet. I believe that is the actual goal of the money-powers behind the Unicorns.
In the late 19th and 20th century, this tactic (selling at losses to put all competitors with shallower pockets out of business) was identified under Anti-Trust law in the U.S. and used to be against the law and punishable.
Now, there is no law. Money creates law for those who have gotten large enough piles of it. And just look at all the Unicorns…New batches every year to fleece, for example, pension funds and aggregate more power and more wealth to extremely small numbers of the most unethical individuals.
And the masses don’t care. They have a “smart phone”, “social” media, and convenient-consumption. For now.
That’s an interesting theory.
A valid one.
Here’s another: How did China resolve its problem with opium dens after dollar diplomacy from US turned large numbers of its population into addicts?
Do you remember Paul Harvey’s “Rest of the Story?”
I heard him tell about FDR being close friends with Henry Luce, founder of Life, Time and, perhaps, People Magazines. Henry Luce was the son of a missionary and had spent his entire childhood in China, missionarying.
So, when FDR insisted China be included as part of the Allies “Big Four”, was it because of Luce’s influence?
I don’t guess it matters, but you gotta wonder about FDR’s commitment to Chiang Kai-shek when it was obvious the Communist’s had taken China too.
Just musings in the middle of the night. Why and when the Donkey Balls? Should I become Bunny Balls?
and Bingo was his name, indeed…
I remember how everyone claimed Amazon was a failed business model from the get go.
HAVE YOU SEEN A BOOK STORE RECENTLY?
Have you been to a library recently and seen the banks of computers and the shrinking aisles of books? I used to go into the basement archives of the library at the University of Oklahoma and become a kid in a candy store just pulling old books from shelves and looking at the names of who had read them. Now? No one reads them. No One.
Amazon made buying books online so cheap, easy and convenient most people do not bother actually touching a book before ordering it and paying digitally.
It is/was very convenient. It makes life very simple and now that all information and data is digital (and MONEY!!!) you do not even need to wait to get the book in the mail. Digital transmission of bits and bytes into the smart phone or tablet in your hand gives you instant book. Comes with its own search engine to help you find meaning.
Now, THAT’S a TABLET!!!!
Inconvenience is the mother of all invention. Need is the Father of Ingenuity. There would be no reason to try to get water from a rock if you weren’t thirsty.
My Aunt Martha once told me all you need to teach a kid to read is a piece of chalk a good chart of the Alphabet and a dictionary on a little stool so the kid can look up words once they figure it out. Paper and colors help, but all that is really necessary is a stick and some sand or dirt. Eventually, the kid will start drawing what’s on that chart and sooner or later, they will open that book.
If you teach them to read digital words, digital words will be all they understand. Just like automated cars will be all they understand. And automated locks on doors.
Listen, I think this is a runaway train. My son told me a chilling story about his awesome new job (January). When he worked at home due to inclement weather, the “software team” were able to link together and work from home on their project because mostly they are babysitting computer programs writing code for the network, if I grasp what the rocket scientist is talking about. (He treats me like an imbecile, so I act like one for him.) Literally, he was working at home with his laptop open, coding, being paid more than I would, while playing Smash Brothers on the big personal computer monstrosity he built in my basement while he was at college.
It really bothers me to think of my son playing video games while he monitors the work being performed FOR him by another computer program. I let him play video games way too much when he was young, it is true. But, when it was time to do the chores, he turned off the games and did the work.
Comfortable is what they try to make you before you die.
EDIT: “all you need to teach a kid to read is a piece of chalk a good chart of the Alphabet and a dictionary on a little stool so the kid can look up words” and you can quote me on that.
At the bargain IPO price of $81 per share, I’m all in. Phuck me???!??
Uber is losing money as it is all about gaining reach, the theory being once world-wide reach has been achieved, and once they have totally cratered the taxi industry, they will be able to jack up prices to profitable levels. The pursuit of reach costs money, and lots of it.
They have one profitable side business, which seems may be very profitable indeed – UberEats, the food delivery service. They are making a lot of money there.
Uber is trying to hit world-domination. If so, they will be very, very profitable and valuable. Will they achieve it? Risky bet.
I don’t know how they could possibly be losing money. They’re running a fucking website. My bet is there is massive fraud involved here.
Star – they have something like 10,000 employees running that website.
Yes, but 10 thousand employees at 150k a year is still only $1.5 billion. They’ve got 3 million drivers. If every one of those drivers makes them ten bucks a week, they make payroll. So how could they be losing 3 billion a year? I smell a rat
Like so many others you are manufacturing positions with nothing but wild conjecture and zero proof. The entirety of their financial position is available with the IPO. A rat will be uncovered.
All conjecture. No question, I haven’t studied any of their financials. But when they carry more debt then Tesla, who’s doing R&D and heavy manufacturing on a product no one else has ever perfected, I get suspicious
Thing about Uber is, the company has a limited life span, IMO. Eventually, they’ll burn through their driver base when they figure out they’re upside down what with automotive and fuel expenses. When that happens they’re SOL and looks like that’s now anyway since they’ve never made a stinkin’ profit.
Why anyone would invest in this mess is a mystery to me.
How many times did I hear that about Amazon?
And, by the way… Sam Walton was an Okie from Missouri, too. I remember the first little Walmart I ever went to… where it sat beside the Rialto Theater in Sikeston, Mo. Now, that is a trashy strip mall with Pawn shops and Tat parlors, perhaps, but there is only one real place to shop there now that the mall closed. The BIG Walmart Superstore.
People thought Walmart would go the way of Woolworth’s.
And Walmart’s biggest competitor is probably Amazon.
What’s that about automated cars being mandated? Hmmm… would Uber help or hurt that agenda?
How? It’s an app. They own no cars, pay no drivers, have no advertising, require no manufacturing, have no warehousing, what possible costs could they possibly have?
This makes absolutely no sense at all other than as another money pit grift operation like Theranos.