Uber Lays Off 400

Post by jschwartzi » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 12:23 AM UTC

johnpowell wrote: post #146

ghaff wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Chinese food is also a commonly delivered item in many places--including but not limited to cities. So I'm not sure pizza is all that unique. That said, a lot of food delivery is some high school kid driving his car around mostly working for tips. You start tacking on the costs of a large delivery-as-a-service company and your costs go up a lot without all that much economy of scale.

Even at a busy Pizza Hut a lot of the delivery drivers will help with making the pizzas, folding the boxes, and cleaning when not delivering. You can pay them X amount with fixed hours and they can stay busy the entire time. With just delivery services there is a lot of standing around time.

Post by selectodude » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 12:37 AM UTC

QuixoticQuibit wrote: post #198

themagician wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketing is all they are. The driver aren't employees. The cars in the fleet aren't their assets. The insurance is handled by someone else and there is no licensing. Uber, itself, is just an app with a giant marketing department. The app itself isn't even that different than it was in 2011. 99% of the functionality that people actually use is exactly the same as it was when they started.

Doesn’t Uber also lease cars to drivers? I was surprised to see in the Bay Area that so many drivers had fairly new cars. I asked one about it and he said that Uber leased it out. Presumably a portion of the driver’s income goes directly towards the car.

Post by freewilly1040 » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 12:39 AM UTC

dawhizkid wrote: post #30

codingdave wrote: post #18

> The marketing team had more than 1,200... I fully admit that I'm not in marketing, so there are surely nuances I don't know. But that scale of marketing department is orders of magnitude above any other place I have worked, with the possible exception of IBM in the 90s. Just maybe... this was a reasonable move.

The "marketing manager" role at Uber is an operations role and part of a local operations teams. Your main job is not "brand marketing" but attracting new drivers and managing local incentive spend. They've most likely (wisely) decided to centralize those decisions, so not a huge surprise. FWIW, the operations teams (small, local, non-technical teams stationed random cities around the world) built Uber into what it i…

Post by rolltiide » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 12:40 AM UTC

bduerst wrote: post #113

mdorazio wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, also from selling bonds.

Raising debt is just as visible on public filings as burning the cash, and gets baked into the market price. It's also hard to do with as few of assets as Uber has.

Post by freewilly1040 » Tue, Jul 30, 2019, 12:43 AM UTC

projektfu wrote: post #168

rsp1984 wrote: post #110

Can someone with insight into the matter explain, from a high level, what the big concerns are over Ubers ability to run profitably? In my naive view they are "just running an app" / acting as a mobility marketplace and they make money on each transaction. Given the traction and market dominance they have this sounds like a really attractive business. So how do they manage to run such big losses every year and which…

The big concerns are whether drivers will continue to accept the pay they are offered. In 2018 they spent $837 million on excess pay to get drivers to accept certain trips. Insurance costs are also high, a large portion of their revenue. Assuming their chart is representative of an average booking, $1 in excess incentives corresponds to a $10 booking. If so, 15-20% of their bookings appear to produce no revenue and c…