101–110 of 139 posts
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Reminds me of a quote I once heard (but can't find now) about Ford or GM, that they aren't an automobile company but rather a finance/loan company.
Kind of like big mining companies aren't actually mining companies, they're finance and investment companies. The actual mining is done by contractors three or four tiers down in the contract stack.
Are they profitable? Last I heard they were losing quite a bit of money. [1] And even if they manage to squeak out a GAAP profit, I'm not sure if the business is sustainable. Given that a lot of the capital and operations costs end up on the books of drivers, it's harder to do the math for an end-to-end costs-vs-benefits comparison. [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/uber-results/uber-narrows-lo...
They're not close to profitable. Recent quarterly losses: Q1: $601 million net loss Q2: $891 million net loss Q3: $1.07 billion net loss I'm not an accountant, but I'm not sure how this can go well for them.
Q1: $601 million net loss, Q2: $891 million net loss, Q3: $1.07 billion net loss
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I would assume that when we’re talking about billions of dollars that the people in charge of creating an IPO strategy are a bit more ahead of the markets than the rest of us right? Full disclosure I’m not knowledgeable in this area, but it would seem to me that this is the case and having made plans months before the market turns isn’t necessarily proof that it isn’t being done with market knowledge. Just a thought.
From what I read in Matt Levine's bloomberg column - not really. Bankers make money by being middle men, not predicting the market.
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Companies usually start to think and prep about IPOs 2 ~ 3 years out. The actual IPO process takes 6 ~ 9 months. People have crammed the process into just 3 months! I built a tool [1] to help startups assess IPO readiness. It's kinda fun to run it against your own employer. [1] https://ipo-ready.com/
What's the privacy policy on your tool? The data that I enter, do you have access to it?
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They're not close to profitable. Recent quarterly losses: Q1: $601 million net loss Q2: $891 million net loss Q3: $1.07 billion net loss I'm not an accountant, but I'm not sure how this can go well for them.
I can't get my head around that. They lose a fortune every few minutes.
I predict that Uber won't meet their subscription goals during the road show and be forced to push off their IPO until 2020 at least, and that Lyft will make it through the gate but will come out with less than a 10% bump in price.
I'm basing that on an investor sentiment that Lyft is more of a 'pure play' in the ride sharing market and Uber is a mix of several businesses which each have their own risks and can pull the company down even if their core business is ok.
Now to wait a year and see how well it ages, hopefully better than MacAfee's bitcoin tweets! :-)
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Prices have actually been dropping recently
Prices where? In Las Vegas? Maybe. In the bay area? no.
1. https://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Las_Vegas-Nevada/
2. https://www.bayareamarketreports.com/trend/san-francisco-hom...
$120 billion? Wow, so SoftBank 3x’ed their $7bn investment in a year?
Yeah, even if the value and markets drop by 50%, it's still crazy. But long term Uber has potential due to their network and diversity now with other offerings.
I think this was really hard, and I think it might be durable; I mean, I am generally kinda leftish and support a well-regulated market, but I also heavily use ridesharing in a way I never used taxi services.
But, while those things are hard and valuable... they aren't exclusive to uber. I mean, ride sharing services are highly location based; like less than 1% of my uber use is done outside of the bay area (and most of the time, in those cases, I'd be willing to pay taxi rates and deal with taxi inconveniences)
I personally have fantasised about building a ride-sharing federation system, or a ride sharing clearinghouse system; You'd hook up your local ride sharing co-op with my app, which would allow the customer to input source and destination addresses, and then get quotes from all interested providers.
So.. what I'm saying is that while I see a lot of value in what uber built, I don't really see how they can prevent another company from moving in (on a per-market basis) and grabbing up all their customers.
I mean, I already use both uber and lyft with a preference for whichever seemed cheaper last time I checked. That doesn't seem like a business with a lot of room to improve margins.
Sustainability is questionable for these firms. Ride hailing and similar services are more likely to evolve into local offerings. It is not a difficult business to replicate, technically, while regulation, infrastructure, social concerns can all be better addressed by local networks. A backlash is growing against exploitation of drivers and privacy weaknesses, which are natural results of the current global aspiratio…
It's hard to replicate the chicken and egg market of drivers and passengers.
I mean, you need a critical mass in a short period of time within an area, but that's just a matter of throwing money at the problem, and there's no reason you couldn't be a perfectly reasonable regional player in this game.
I mean, of course, at current prices, where margins are all but negative, that requires a lot of money; but in an environment where uber charged enough to have a healthy, profitable business? whenever the uber margins started to climb, you'd see regional competitors popping up.
I mean, that's just my guess. We don't know, because we haven't seen a high margin ride sharing pricing scheme, not after uber made it clear that companies didn't need to follow taxi regulations.
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That is a meaningless statement. The decision to prepare is distinct from the decision to commit. It's farcical to imagine that these overvalued companies are just filing on sheer momentum. Doing it now is an affirmative decision. Also, the drop began two months ago and the signs of volatility where there in January.
To be fair, they have been talking of a 2019 IPO since more then a year ago.