Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Uber's Loss Exceeds $800M in Q3 on $1.7B in Net Revenue

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 424 posts

Re: Uber's Loss Exceeds $800M in Q3 on $1.7B in Net Revenue

#211

Post by nimchimpsky »

animex wrote: post #167

Uber will be a dead Unicorn in the medium future. They've got too many legal pressures, competitors with native advantages (i.e. the automakers), and their expansion plans have them overextended. Here in Edmonton, AB, Canada, regulatory changes have pushed the Uber prices to almost 2x during non-surge times over regular taxis. Taxi's have stepped up. Local competitors have sprouted. Carshares are abounding. It's all…

conversely uber is much cheaper in uk and sydney, compared to taxis. Much more convenient, and no competitors.

Re: Uber's Loss Exceeds $800M in Q3 on $1.7B in Net Revenue

#212

Post by intrasight »

colechristensen wrote: post #181
orthoganol wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think almost certainly their profitability is dependent on a future of driverless cars, and I'm sure that's what they are pitching investors. Fearfully, since their survival means going driverless and they are now losing $800 million a quarter, they will race to get driverless cars on the road, it will be rushed, and it could be reckless. I'm thinking the two driverless cars filmed blowing red lights in SF recently…

Reckless and non-viable in much of the world. Nobody is going to get an autonomous car working in a winter climate for a long time. Lines on the road can't be seen, there are potholes, driving through deep piles of snow are common, communicating with other drivers and accomidating and anticipating their actions in snow narrowed streets is necessary.... There are plenty of times of year where I'd be wary trusting a hu…

Uber autonomous doesn't have to be better than the best human drivers in all conditions. They only have to be much better than the average human driver in all conditions. This isn't a very high threshold to meet.

Re: Uber's Loss Exceeds $800M in Q3 on $1.7B in Net Revenue

#213

Post by aianus »

tehlike wrote: post #178
rubicon33 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, Google drove a blind man to Taco Bell in 2012 and still hasn't released a self driving car 4 years later. Meanwhile, Uber's been in the self driving car business half that time? They already looks more likely to actually have these things on the road, and, they have the incentive, and cash pool to do it. Another reason people "get this impression" is that Google has a history of interesting projects that never m…

as a google employee, this often makes me sad too, but when it comes to human life, it's a bit more nuanced than that. engineers don't have the luxury to do many things they could otherwise do on their server side software. You break a server, you fire-drill it, get the resources, roll back the release or so on. You lose money, sometimes tens of millions of dollars, but not human life. You write your post mortem, and…

You could have used those $10m to save hundreds or thousands of lives. It doesn't make any sense to hypothetically spend $10m extra dollars to save a single life.

Re: Uber's Loss Exceeds $800M in Q3 on $1.7B in Net Revenue

#214

Post by WhitneyLand »

The runway is finite. They have about ~5B in cash on hand and are losing ~3B per year. They are putting on the spending brakes somewhat but revenue will have to take off for their valuation to make sense.

They've already said no more dilution, so that limits new sources of financing. Tick-tock.

Re: Uber's Loss Exceeds $800M in Q3 on $1.7B in Net Revenue

#215

Post by jimmywanger »

mindcrime wrote: post #49
antiviral wrote: post #6

Uber is making the rest of us in SV look terrible. 1. Collect a huge pile of money at sky-high valuations from those who really should know better. 2. Ignore any sensible unit economics and undercut local taxi/transport services until those small businesses go bankrupt since they don't have Uber's money pile. 3. Evade local regulations that everyone else follows in the name of 'innovation' even though the reality is…

Evade local regulations that everyone else follows in the name of 'innovation' even though the reality is they are just taking a free pass on conducting background checks, and skipping safety guidelines. When they replace all taxis, do they really think they can just permanently ignore all driving laws? Since when do hackers bleat about obeying laws and regulations? What happened to having a "we can do better" mindse…

> Since when do hackers bleat about obeying laws and regulations?

Bleat? People would give Uber a pass if they actually created new and innovative technology.

Right now they're much more of a financial services (attracting VC funds) and DC lobbying firm than a technologically innovative company. They have a few (albeit NP complete) interesting technological problems. The rest is mostly legal and finance.

Why wouldn't people complain about companies who try to muscle in with money and lobbying featuring products that are not noticeably superior at all?

Re: Uber's Loss Exceeds $800M in Q3 on $1.7B in Net Revenue

#216

Post by wahern »

johnny22 wrote: post #194
toomuchtodo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I tried Lyft the other day, but after they charged me $25 as an "authorization hold" without notification, I cancelled my ride and decided to stick with Uber. Note that Uber's auth charge is usually around $1. $25 may not be a significant amount for some, but it's non-trivial for a college student like myself. Most gas pumps authorize $100. Use a credit card.

not everybody has a credit card.

It's a horrible idea to use a debit card for electronic payments. The laws that require credit card companies to refund unauthorized charges are much more consumer friendly than for debits from your bank account.

With a credit card your maximum liability for fraudulent charges is $50 even if you don't timely report a stolen card or suspect transaction; $0 if you do. For debit cards, it's unlimited.

So, for example, somebody could fraudulently use your debit card number to buy a stick of gum, hoping the charge goes unnoticed. Then, 60 days later, they drain your entire bank account, and possibly other linked accounts if you have automatic overdraft protection. If you failed to notify the bank for the gum purchase, your entire life savings is lost. Even if the bank account is only used for small purchases and only maintains a small balance, it can still create huge headaches.

Debit cards are for ATMs, and preferably ATMs inside bank buildings. Credit cards are for transactions everywhere else.

For similar reasons, you should be careful who you write checks to--because similar rules that govern debit card transactions also govern ACH transactions. And if you can help it, don't link a checking account on which you draw checks and make other payments to any of your other accounts; or at least, don't then enable automatic overdraft protection.

Re: Uber's Loss Exceeds $800M in Q3 on $1.7B in Net Revenue

#217

Post by Fricken »

qyv wrote: post #85
rubicon33 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? What's the end game? The end game is a company with self driving cars, having SIGNIFICANTLY less overhead than they currently do with human drivers. And, probably a ton of technology patents to boot? Yea, they're definitely a brazen company, but do you really expect anything less from a unicorn company? Very few make it this big without cutting some corners, having some connection, etc.

Self driving or driverless? I don't see any significant savings for self-driving cars, you still need to pay the person and you have the significant added expense of fleet maintenance. Not to mention liability concerns, unless they plan in passing that off onto the 'drivers'. Driverless cars on the other had and still decades away, whether the tech is ready or not. Society is not yet at a place that will allow the us…

For established tech and car companies, both Uber and Florida have basically no rules about testing and implementation of autonomous vehicles. Essentially the only rule is 'don't make us look bad, guys'.

Google is a league ahead of the competition with their Autonomous OS, and they're getting close to implementing robotaxis commercially in limited capacities. However, Chris Urmson, ex CTO of the self driving project doesn't think they'll be able to go everywhere a human can for ~30 years.

Uber's autonomous program is looking pretty sketchy at the moment, but now that they have Anthony Levandowski to play Darth Vader to Kalanick's Emperor Palpatine, the project is in capable hands.

Uber's robotaxis need only augment their human network of drivers through the mid-term, and as the capabilities of their Autonomous OS improves they take over more responsibility. Still, this is capital intensive and it'll be still be many years before autonomous vehicles have any measurable effect on Uber's bottom line, and even then, Uber will still be facing competition from other companies with robotaxi networks in development, including but not limited to GM/Lyft/Cruise, The Tesla Network, Waymo, Zoox, and any Automaker willing to license from the Mobileye/Delphi/Intel partnership.

Uber is currently playing hardball with the California DMV, in some sort of attempt at asserting their dominance over the law. I'm not sure if they've got some kind of legit strategy here or not, because I'm skeptical they'll have as much luck leveraging popular public support against regulators in the Autonomous Vehicle space with as they've had in the taxi industry.

It's also an inevitability that Uber's labour will organize for better bargaining power. Legislators seem to side with drivers as 'employees' rather than 'contractors' in the few regional cases that have made it through the courts.

Nonetheless, these incomplete financial reports that have been leaking out make it easy to spin a negative narrative about Uber's future prospects. That narrative may be on the mark, but we can't know for sure.

Re: Uber's Loss Exceeds $800M in Q3 on $1.7B in Net Revenue

#218

Post by jimmywanger »

quickben wrote: post #171
Retric wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The math does not seem to work out for them. (1.7b / 0.8b + 1.7b) = 68% of their costs. 3.25 * 0.68 = 2.21$, but Uber charges more than that and would like some profit. aka Uber has higher costs than cab companies making them a long term dead end. Sure, they are probably subsidizing other markets more, but even then that are gong to run out of money long before the self driving car thing takes off.

You are assuming perfectly rational market. It isn't. Many people here would dodge Uber if they expect surge pricing (And something along these lines was said today on one of the popular for young people radios stations, here). Also, there are plenty of taxi just waiting around everywhere downtown. Many (older?) people, would never get Uber to go to the airport, which is a very good profit opportunity. So, I don't se…

> Many people here would dodge Uber if they expect surge pricing

Notice that they've stopped displaying the surge price multiple on their hail screen. Previously I would have hesitated at 1.4x surge, but now "fares are slightly higher due to increased demand" just makes me shrug my shoulders.

Re: Uber's Loss Exceeds $800M in Q3 on $1.7B in Net Revenue

#219

Post by tedunangst »

Cyph0n wrote: post #7
nharada wrote: post #4

Presumably this is intentional -- Uber could raise prices and make more money, but right now they're choosing to keep prices very low in order to undercut Lyft and the cab companies with the assumption that having a monopoly will return more profits in the future. At least anecdotally, here in SF Lyft is almost always more expensive than Uber.

I tried Lyft the other day, but after they charged me $25 as an "authorization hold" without notification, I cancelled my ride and decided to stick with Uber. Note that Uber's auth charge is usually around $1. $25 may not be a significant amount for some, but it's non-trivial for a college student like myself. I would have been happy had they just notified me first instead of my bank. Terrible UX to be frank. I actua…

Better $25 than $28000. http://www.philly.com/philly/business/Uber-customers-get-sur...

Re: Uber's Loss Exceeds $800M in Q3 on $1.7B in Net Revenue

#220

Post by zouhair »

animex wrote: post #167

Uber will be a dead Unicorn in the medium future. They've got too many legal pressures, competitors with native advantages (i.e. the automakers), and their expansion plans have them overextended. Here in Edmonton, AB, Canada, regulatory changes have pushed the Uber prices to almost 2x during non-surge times over regular taxis. Taxi's have stepped up. Local competitors have sprouted. Carshares are abounding. It's all…

As much as I hated and still hate the Uber tactics and way of business, I have to give to them, they managed to shake things up and force taxi companies to get on with the times or suffer hard ones. All in all it will be good for consumers and workers as long as Uber is forced to pay its dues where it wants to do business.
Post reply on HN