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Uber Q3 Results

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Re: Uber Q3 Results

#151

Post by TheCoelacanth »

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…

Businesses without network effects or barriers to entry are fine, but they can't afford to burn billions in investor cash every quarter the way that Uber does. They are never going to have the out-sized profits to justify those initial losses.

Re: Uber Q3 Results

#152

Post by TheCoelacanth »

rauchp wrote: post #56
kn0where wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No way a Lyft merger could be approved in any kind of sane society. It would turn a duopoly into a monopoly.

If both companies are approaching bankruptcy trying to outlast the other, wouldn't the lesser evil be a world with a ride-share monopoly rather than a world without (large scale) ridesharing? With the amount of people that use these rideshare companies as their primary job or to make their daily commute, it seems hard to imagine going back to the pre-Uber/Lyft days. Not that the government or any regulatory body woul…

Competitors driving each other towards near-zero profits is how capitalism is supposed to work.

The problem is that there is no willingness to enforce laws against predatory pricing, so no one can even break even on this type of transportation.

Re: Uber Q3 Results

#153

Post by TheCoelacanth »

gok wrote: post #50
scarface74 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you take their made up, non GAAP, financial measurement of “adjusted EBITDA” seriously. This is no better than WeWork’s “community adjusted EBITDA” and we see how that worked out. Adjusted EBITDA. We define Adjusted EBITDA as net income (loss), excluding (i) income (loss) from discontinued operations, net of income taxes, (ii) net income (loss) attributable to non-controlling interests, net of tax, (iii) prov…

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…

EBITDA is a wipespread (though still somewhat sketchy) practice. "Adjusted EBITDA" is just making up fairy-tale numbers.

Re: Uber Q3 Results

#154

Post by bart_spoon »

heyflyguy wrote: post #11

I'd love to hear some smart people opinions on this idea: "Uber doesn't need to be profitable, they just need to survive until their autonomous cars are deployed"

Well as someone who works in machine learning, I'm not convinced autonomous cars are anywhere close to becoming a reality, so they could have to survive for quite a long time.

Re: Uber Q3 Results

#155

Post by shaneprrlt »

josteink wrote: post #138
adjkant wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stock based compensation is a big chunk of that which arguably doesn't really cost Uber anything really. I think the bigger takeaway is that its STILL 500 million dollars lost per quarter which is insane.

> I think the bigger takeaway is that its STILL 500 million dollars lost per quarter which is insane. And that’s to develop and maintain an app , probably one of the absolutely cheapest things one can do in any industry. Quite maddening indeed.

I think that is massively trivializing the technical complexity of engineering a system that powers millions of rides, food orders, freight orders, etc globally every single day.

As an example, look at how they've improved upon GPS in urban areas to take into account satellite visibility to determine which side of the street you're on: https://eng.uber.com/rethinking-gps/

They invest tons into just solving small problems like that. Not to mention all the open source work they do, ATG, etc.

Then consider that Uber has to have pretty big operations, sales, marketing, and support teams in each market they operate in. It's not just a handful of engineers working in SF. Their massive costs considering their scale makes total sense to me. This is not to conclude one way or another whether or not they are a viable business.

Re: Uber Q3 Results

#156

Post by scarface74 »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #153
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…

EBITDA is a wipespread (though still somewhat sketchy) practice. "Adjusted EBITDA" is just making up fairy-tale numbers.

I didn’t realize the EBiTDA wasn’t GAAP. But you are absolutely right.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/ebitda.asp

Re: Uber Q3 Results

#157

Post by malandrew »

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…

> Any brand loyalty will evaporate literally overnight as soon as someone launches a driverless ride service

This argument only makes sense if a driverless ride service can be launched overnight. Driverless rollout will take many many years. The slower the rollout and patchier the service availability, the better off the TNCs are.

Re: Uber Q3 Results

#158

Post by malandrew »

wasdfff wrote: post #149
skinnymuch wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a good chance suburban areas would not have ride sharing for a long time if that happened. All the alternatives popping up would be in cities and dense urban areas for a long time. Or if they get them, they might just be priced worse than the taxis.

Suburban areas already suck for ride shade. Try hailing a lyft in the proper suburbs, should take you over a half hour.

What about Uber? I ordered it in a podunk city in eastern Washington recently and the wait was like 7 minutes.

Re: Uber Q3 Results

#159

Post by gok »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #153
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…

EBITDA is a wipespread (though still somewhat sketchy) practice. "Adjusted EBITDA" is just making up fairy-tale numbers.

Which adjustments in particular do you find deceptive in Uber's case?

Re: Uber Q3 Results

#160

Post by gok »

scarface74 wrote: post #156
TheCoelacanth wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EBITDA is a wipespread (though still somewhat sketchy) practice. "Adjusted EBITDA" is just making up fairy-tale numbers.

I didn’t realize the EBiTDA wasn’t GAAP. But you are absolutely right. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/ebitda.asp

There are legitimate reasons to report non-GAAP numbers next to the required GAAP numbers. When it was required to recognize revenue phone sales over 2 years, Apple included non-GAAP numbers to give investors a better sense of how sales were actually growing, and reported it as "Adjusted Sales" and "Adjusted Net Income." These were completely made up terms, but they did give a vastly more accurate image of where the company was going than the GAAP numbers did.
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