Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate • Hacker News Board

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#411

Post by o-__-o » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 2:02 AM UTC

standardUser wrote: post #216

switch007 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past month, I and friends/family have experienced the following with Uber: - Accusations of racism - Dangerous driving - Detours/no idea where they're going - Being held hostage (took 4 very strong demands to be let out) - Given a lecture because the driver couldn't find the address and told if you don't like the service to get out. The grass isn't always greener

I take rideshare services multiple times per week with zero problems. Maybe it has something to do with the region/city? I've had the occasional issues, and in a few cases I've gotten out and called another car. But around 98% of the time it's completely frictionless.

Never had the 70 year old driver who drives 5mph under the speed limit and stops for any thing that looks like its near the road? Then I say your post is a big lie!

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#412

Post by cheriot » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 2:13 AM UTC

olalonde wrote: post #404

cheriot wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope they don't actually think that. Autonomous vehicles will turn a two sided market into a one sided market. Just think about all the companies working on self driving cars that don't currently compete with Uber. As soon as they succeed, they'll build an app, buy thousands of cars, and cut the per ride price to nothing.

Edit: misread comment. What I meant was that even with autonomous cars, there will probably be a huge market leader (but it won't necessarily be Uber).

It doesn't take dozens. GM, Tesla, and Google are already making the expensive part of the investment (developing ai cars in the first place). Will Uber make more money with one competitor or four?

I mean, is there a chance these three companies develope autonomous vehicles and decide NOT to compete in ride sharing?

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#413

Post by daseiner1 » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 2:14 AM UTC

Thorentis wrote: post #285

xster wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is what worries me about the "mainstream" debate that might be incorrectly framing the whole problem altogether. Here, the rise of the gig economy came from automation. Not in the caricature sense that there are robot automatons that serve your plates in a restaurant, but in a sense that scalable automated processes replaced human dispatchers that answers your phone calls at the taxi companies and radios…

Yep, this is a fascinating (and scary) thing to think about. What will happen to a society where every single person has their basic needs met by some form of automation, and nobody needs to work? I would say most first world countries are already in this scenario if so much money wasn't spent on non essentials. Industrial scale farming, mass produced pharmaceuticals, rapid house construction etc. mean that if a soci…

the last man

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#414

Post by ummonk » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 2:18 AM UTC

georgeecollins wrote: post #281

ummonk wrote: post #29

Is it just me or is 12% growth in adjusted revenue very mediocre for a company taking a loss and trading at Uber’s revenue multiple?

It makes no financial sense. You can't even talk about what the P/E multiple should be for that growth rate because you can't guess what their earnings will be. As many others have posted they are not close to breaking even so it is hard to conclude what changes they would have to make to earn $1 in operations. (I know they have had a profit in a qtr. I am taking operating profit.)

Yeah I mean at their growth rate they would need like 100% profitability to justify the current market cap.

The P/S multiple is what you’d expect the P/E multiple to be.

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#415

Post by Udik » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 2:23 AM UTC

paxys wrote: post #298

Udik wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask something that will sound incredibly naive? How complicated needs to be an IT infrastructure that lets you book a taxi via an app and pay the driver? Is it really something to throw billions at each year? Sometimes I feel these companies are throwing billions in IT simply because they're expected to be disruptive technology companies, and not for real technical reasons.

Uber as a product is very technologically complex, mainly because of the scale it operates at. You can read about some of their tech at https://eng.uber.com .

From that page I can see that they created their own deep learning framework, their own AI conversational agents, their own data science platform, their own geospatial indexing system, their own web applications framework, etc. The list seems to go on and on and on.

Essentially they seem to be repeating whatever Google and Facebook are doing: but those are pure technology companies that serve two orders of magnitude more customers and have contributed building the web as we know it. Uber is a taxi company.

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#416

Post by xyzzyz » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 2:25 AM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #380

xyzzyz wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> have stricter punishments over traffic violations That certainly doesn't stop them from speeding, cutting you off, going straight from right turn lanes and generally driving very aggresively. Cab drivers are really one of the worst when it comes to following traffic rules, second only to urban bicyclists.

Soo... because they aren't being punished after registering with law enforcement, I shouldn't have to register at all?

No, what I’m saying is if law is not being enforced, it’s useless, and so pointing at it as some kind of advantage of taxis over Uber is severely misguided.

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#417

Post by jazzyjackson » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 2:27 AM UTC

Udik wrote: post #268

paxys wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"R&D" usually includes all engineering expenses on financial reports, which for a company like Uber is the vast majority of operating expenses.

Can I ask something that will sound incredibly naive? How complicated needs to be an IT infrastructure that lets you book a taxi via an app and pay the driver? Is it really something to throw billions at each year? Sometimes I feel these companies are throwing billions in IT simply because they're expected to be disruptive technology companies, and not for real technical reasons.

I imagine a driver-passenger matchmaking system could be craigslist level of simplicity, but Uber and Lyft want to suck up every piece of data: ingesting and analyzing where people are when they open the app, how many people give up on finding a driver, how long every driver is idling on the side of the road, whether a user is probably a cop, etc etc

They use this data to update their surge pricing by the minute for all these different geofences all over the world... yeah, I think having the self image of a technology company that wanted to attract the best talent definitely created a lot of expensive problems for itself.

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#418

Post by cal5k » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 2:27 AM UTC

spike021 wrote: post #327

cal5k wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, and it might arrive in 10 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, or never. It's an awful experience.

Eh there have been plenty of times where requesting an Uber took one of those amounts of times too.

I live in downtown Toronto so it's rarely more than 2 minutes. But even when travelling it's a rare day when it hits 10 minutes.

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#419

Post by trca » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 2:28 AM UTC

cheriot wrote: post #412

olalonde wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: misread comment. What I meant was that even with autonomous cars, there will probably be a huge market leader (but it won't necessarily be Uber).

It doesn't take dozens. GM, Tesla, and Google are already making the expensive part of the investment (developing ai cars in the first place). Will Uber make more money with one competitor or four? I mean, is there a chance these three companies develope autonomous vehicles and decide NOT to compete in ride sharing?

Well we already know Tesla (RoboTaxi) and Google (Waymo One) are entering the ride sharing market (Waymo One is currently live), not sure about GM's ambitions.

Re: Uber Posts $5.2B Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate

#420

Post by xster » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 2:42 AM UTC

clairity wrote: post #402

xster wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya, rereading what I wrote, I might have missed a part of what I was trying to address. I don't think anyone is proposing that humans then do nothing and watch VR porn while being tube fed for the rest of their lives. There is indeed an infinite amount of things left to do. The question is given this 'initial condition' where everyone is where they are currently in 2019, who does that work. Is it the 56 year old truc…

first, while long-haul interstate driving is probably the easiest type of driving to automate, it's pretty audacious to assume that automated trucks will take over the industry any time soon. there are still many social, political and legal issues to wade through, never mind the economic and technical. but to follow your line of reasoning, what you do is walk up to him and say, "hey, in the next 10 years, your job is…

Ah, I see where you're coming from. I mean retraining just seems to make sense and we all want it to work, but pragmatically, they just don't https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/01/the-fa....

Our mental plasticity just has age related limits.

I'd also debate the conclusion you're making on which approach is more patronizing. I'd assume giving you (and everyone) the means to make your own choices with money is less patronizing than appointing your specific job as a lost cause and appointing new jobs for you to go train yourself for.