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Uber Q3 Results

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Re: Uber Q3 Results

#91

Post by onion2k »

pbreit wrote: post #65
ganitarashid wrote: post #17

Having new “one-time” charges every quarter means those are not one-time charges. They’re part of the business, which means the business doesn’t work. One of Ubers biggest problems is that they have zero brand loyalty. For a company that sells a utility (get me, or my food, from A to B) rather than an experience (like a cool vacation in a unique mansion), I will always pick the cheapest option. Whether that’s Uber or…

Much of your post is wrong. Would need to evaluate the one-time charges to determine if they actually would be ongoing. Simply having some one-time charges doesn't mean they will necessarily be perpetual. In fact, the vast majority of riders have a preferred option even without the frequent rider incentives. This is even starker on the driver side. The advent of pooling and continuing improvement absolutely have had…

Uber & Lyft are in the best position to take advantage of robo-drivers.

I don't think they are. The cost savings on using driveless cars for taxis are huge. Any operator will be able to massively undercut the competition. Consequently the most sensible thing for whichever company gets a level 5 driverless car first would be to run their own ride company and not sell or license the tech to anyone else. That's what Waymo is all about and why Uber are trying to invent their own driverless tech.

Any brand loyalty will evaporate literally overnight as soon as someone launches a driverless ride service simply because it'll be half the price of all the other human-operated services, far more reliable (no more cancellations for a better fare), and probably have many more cars available 24/7.

Re: Uber Q3 Results

#92

Post by te_chris »

ganitarashid wrote: post #76
mikemotherwell wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are way more positives than that: # No money changes hands, so safer for drivers. # No payment is made in the vehicle, so faster exit times. # Uber records all trips, so easier to work out costs to expense. # Uber uses any credit card, so your boss can pay for your ride without the need for separate expensing. # Driver and passenger are tracked, so there it is easy to find who did what. There are a lot of rape…

Those are all great things. And all of them are done by the competitors. In Europe I use MyTaxi, same thing as Uber but much nicer cars

You mean FreeNow or whatever... Don't understand that rebrand at all, MyTaxi is a great name. Not sexy or enigmatic, but it's a challenger brand.

Re: Uber Q3 Results

#93

Post by sytelus »

ganitarashid wrote: post #17

Having new “one-time” charges every quarter means those are not one-time charges. They’re part of the business, which means the business doesn’t work. One of Ubers biggest problems is that they have zero brand loyalty. For a company that sells a utility (get me, or my food, from A to B) rather than an experience (like a cool vacation in a unique mansion), I will always pick the cheapest option. Whether that’s Uber or…

Experience matters - a lot! Recently I got new phone and it was bit of an adventure just to login to Uber. After that I'd to add CC numbers manually. For Lyft it was simply taking a photo. There are several other small things, for example, I want tips to be included in single charge for easier receipts for business trips. I want review to be annonymous. I want app to ask me landmark if it detects poor GPS in places like NYC. I want some sort of negative reward for driver if they cancel on me. In my trip to India I learned that there was 50% chance drivers would cancel on you in Ola and 20% in Uber. All these are complex issues and neither Uber or Lyft has solved it perfectly. My money will go to company which provides greatest experience, not the 10% difference in price.

Both companies are doing right thing to invest heavily in new businesses + experiences + new markets - despite what pundits say around here and that wall street wants to suck out all growth for short term "shareholder value maximization".

Re: Uber Q3 Results

#94

Post by avocado4 »

marcell wrote: post #45
ganitarashid wrote: post #17

Having new “one-time” charges every quarter means those are not one-time charges. They’re part of the business, which means the business doesn’t work. One of Ubers biggest problems is that they have zero brand loyalty. For a company that sells a utility (get me, or my food, from A to B) rather than an experience (like a cool vacation in a unique mansion), I will always pick the cheapest option. Whether that’s Uber or…

People in tech industry have excessive bias against businesses with no network effects or other obscenely effective barriers to entry. There are lots of successful, large corporations with varying levels of barriers to entry. Exxon Mobil doesn't have a network effect and has zero brand loyalty, but it's still a huge business. McDonald's also lacks network effects, though it does have some brand loyalty, perhaps simil…

> McDonald's also lacks network effects, though it does have some brand loyalty

McDonald's is top 10 most valuable brand in the world. It has massive brand loyalty & defensibility through it.

Re: Uber Q3 Results

#95

Post by gok »

scarface74 wrote: post #81
gok wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well ok first, there's a world of difference between the reasonably widespread practice of adjusted EBITDA and inventing your definition that does not account for the costs of marketing or leases. But I'm really not even commenting on these results precisely. They would have been in an entirely different position without all the distractions. Uber's ride business now makes a billion dollars a month in revenue. That's…

There is a reason we have a GAAP as a way of not letting companies just make up metrics. Any company can show a “profit” as long as you don’t count expenses that make you unprofitable. They leave out over a dozen expenses to claim some made up definition of “profitability”. From their numbers, how do you get that just the ride hailing business would make more money than it cost to run? Adjusted EBITDA is just a made…

This is a fundamentally "what-if" scenario so it's not going to be perfect math, but we can look for hints. To go from non-GAAP to GAAP, you can add the adjustments up. The biggest non-GAAP adjustment (around 2/3rds of total) is stock-based compensation. That $401 million in stock-based compensation really can't be repeated, and wouldn't have been so large if they had IPO'd sooner. The next big they spent another ~$250million on driver incentives, almost entirely on UberEats.

How much of their expenses are required for a theoretical rides-only Uber? Impossible to say; they don't break out spending by segment. But we can make some guesses. The rides product has now existed for many, many years. Did they really need to become a ~22,000 employee company if all they were going to do is rides? I would guess no. So the question here is really: how much of their current expenses do we think only exist due non-rideshare business? The autonomy program is evidently an expensive bust. I see a lot of scooter marketing, which we can tell from this report isn't selling. Food is growing but they're in 3rd place, and it seems like they spend a lot of money to even get to third. So really the question is: are >30% of their expenses due to the non-ride business? I would guess yes.

Re: Uber Q3 Results

#96

Post by arcticbull »

greggman2 wrote: post #70
cavisne wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least for me uber has huge brand loyalty, it’s sitting in the dock of my iPhone. If I need to go somewhere, or get home, Uber has never let me down. Likewise with food delivery, I certainly have been let down on that but Uber does the best job of letting me track the order and get a refund if needed. Sure Lyft is an alternative, I have it on my phone but simply never use it. It’s incorrect that nothing has changed…

I switched to Lyft a few years ago because of Uber's evil ways. I've had zero problems. If people won't stop using a company that is so blatantly bad we're in trouble.

Frankly they're basically interchangeable. I'm not sure what you mean by a company "so blatantly bad" -- most of the drivers in SF at least drive for both Uber and Lyft. You can use either app and end up with the same driver, in the same car, offering the same exact experience at a practically indistinguishable price point. Uber at least seems to know people are mad at them and offer excellent customer service.

Now, that doesn't mean they're a good business of course -- they're probably a terrible business -- but that's a reason to use them, not to avoid them.

With that in mind, unit economics at both Uber and Lyft seem to be about the same, and both equally dreadful. Lyft never made some of the even worse investments (like trying to compete in mainland China without government support). Those days appear long behind Uber, though, for better or worse.

Re: Uber Q3 Results

#97

Post by Huggernaut »

te_chris wrote: post #92
ganitarashid wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are all great things. And all of them are done by the competitors. In Europe I use MyTaxi, same thing as Uber but much nicer cars

You mean FreeNow or whatever... Don't understand that rebrand at all, MyTaxi is a great name. Not sexy or enigmatic, but it's a challenger brand.

Right?! I was so confused when I was scrolling through my app list and saw this logo, I briefly wondered if I had installed some kind of social awareness app, I just had no idea what I was looking at.

Re: Uber Q3 Results

#98

Post by arcticbull »

kkotak wrote: post #32
georgeecollins wrote: post #10

You have to go past a lot of non-GAAP accounting to see that they actually lost $1.1B last quarter, almost all from operations. There is a nice chart showing all the things they are taking out to get their adjusted EBITDA of -0.5B. It seems like they are always taking out a bunch of one time charges to claim that there core business would be profitable. But every quarter they have those charges. I don't understand ho…

You're an idiot if you lose $100 from your pocket, but you're a genius if you lose -$1.1B of other people's money every quarter.

My personal goal is to become too big to fail. It's doable, I mean, it worked for Adam Neumann.

Re: Uber Q3 Results

#99

Post by b3kart »

onion2k wrote: post #91
pbreit wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of your post is wrong. Would need to evaluate the one-time charges to determine if they actually would be ongoing. Simply having some one-time charges doesn't mean they will necessarily be perpetual. In fact, the vast majority of riders have a preferred option even without the frequent rider incentives. This is even starker on the driver side. The advent of pooling and continuing improvement absolutely have had…

Uber & Lyft are in the best position to take advantage of robo-drivers. I don't think they are. The cost savings on using driveless cars for taxis are huge. Any operator will be able to massively undercut the competition. Consequently the most sensible thing for whichever company gets a level 5 driverless car first would be to run their own ride company and not sell or license the tech to anyone else. That's what Way…

> (no more cancellations for a better fare)

Wouldn’t be so sure about that. The operating company will still be trying to maximise profits after all.

Re: Uber Q3 Results

#100

Post by mepiethree »

ngoel36 wrote: post #61
ganitarashid wrote: post #17

Having new “one-time” charges every quarter means those are not one-time charges. They’re part of the business, which means the business doesn’t work. One of Ubers biggest problems is that they have zero brand loyalty. For a company that sells a utility (get me, or my food, from A to B) rather than an experience (like a cool vacation in a unique mansion), I will always pick the cheapest option. Whether that’s Uber or…

> Uber has only made finding the ride more efficient but it has not made the actual ride itself more efficient. Driver cost per trip = Driver cost per hour / Driver utilization. By making finding the ride more efficient, Uber meaningfully increases driver utilization, decreasing driver cost per trip.

Drivers arent paid per hour though
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