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Uber's Still Not Profitable

pluralistic.net

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Re: Uber's Still Not Profitable

#81

Post by shp0ngle »

On one hand, I hate Uber/Grab sham financials. And how it pretends it’s “car sharing” and not just regular taxi.

(Also the Grab/Uber deal was explicitly illegal and was even ruled illegal in Singapore. Note that Grab and Uber are both owned by Masa and own each other.)

And their explicit business plan of “losing on each sale in ordering to monopolise and then increase prices” is idiotic. (People always cite Amazon and their razor thin margins, but… Amazon never lost money on every sale.)

On the other hand, they vastly improved experiences of both sides of the taxi deal. That’s just the truth. And articles like this pretend the state before these apps was beautiful pristine state of perfect taxis and public transport and they destroyed that. No? They didn’t.

So… I’m glad that those apps exist, even when their economics make no sense.

Re: Uber's Still Not Profitable

#82

Post by occz »

snowpiercer wrote: post #58
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #4

I think they were really betting on autonomous driving, fueled by Elon Musks lies and hype. They built up the digital infrastructure and so much clout their company name & product became a verb on the level of googling. But now taxi-level 100% autonomous no-driving-wheel cars are farther away than ever. The current broad generation of machine learning and sensors reached its maximum and it‘s looking bleak.

Wow. ..I'm really surprised by this comment..what do you mean by "farther away than ever" . I just recently started learning to code and I really want to go into machine learning ..does it mean there isn't any major innovation right now in the field ?

That's probably not what they meant.

What I interpreted it as was that the current iteration of machine learning will not be able to satisfactorily solve full self-driving cars.

Re: Uber's Still Not Profitable

#83

Post by nroets »

matsemann wrote: post #65

What is Uber's "moat"? After all, it's "just an app" and there are so many of them now. Most drivers here have like 5 different ride hailing apps installed and take a ride from whatever shows up.

Uber will learn to satisfy riders' preferences: Some riders what VIP treatment, others want the fastest possible service. Some riders live in a bad neighbourhood and want a driver to take them there.

Uber is also learning which drivers are not trustworthy and removing them from their system.

Over time users will have bad experiences with competing apps and delete them from their phones.

Re: Uber's Still Not Profitable

#84

Post by rich_sasha »

yccs27 wrote: post #62
fleventynine wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't such a law stop Google from releasing Android as open source? AOSP cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, but it doesn't cost anything to use. In such a world, could companies even contribute patches to Linux? Making Linux better without expectation of profit could be considered predatory pricing against Microsoft.

The difference is that predatory pricing includes an expectation of future profits from that product. So it makes sense to exclude perpetual free licenses like open source from the definition.

Presumably Google benefits financially from the Android ecosystem. Play store if nothing else.

You can imagine a different world where many mobile OS providers exist, charge you for the system, then comes out Google with free Android, kills the competition and then milks monopoly pricing.

Re: Uber's Still Not Profitable

#85

Post by varispeed »

Author hears the bells, but can't quite put a finger on it.

If a highly successful company is not profitable, then it usually means only one thing - they are very good at tax avoidance. Profit attracts Corporation Tax, so big corporation use creative accounting techniques to transfer it somewhere where they don't have to pay tax or it is very very low. There are other reasons why one would want to pocket the profits / hide - for instance when a salary attracts very high tax - paying a CEO level salary may seem like a waste. So what often companies do, they are signing a contract with a company indirectly controlled by a CEO level for services that sound legitimate and pay the fees. Then that company is doing it's own creative accounting.

People forget that a company does not have to have profit to be healthy. Profit comes after all obligations and investments are paid. It is actually in the company interest to not have any profit, so they reinvest money and pay good salaries. Only people interested in profit are shareholder and usually it comes at the expense of people who actually do the work.

Re: Uber's Still Not Profitable

#86

Post by smcl »

jmeister wrote: post #64
lozenge wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does that have to do with Musk? Musk never worked at Google and Tesla s self driving technology lacks key sensors compared to what Waymo and Uber were working with.

/u/failingknife, I cannot reply to you, but thanks for making only relevant comment on this entire thread.

I can't see why it's relevant. We're talking about Uber's bet on self-driving cars and this person commented with an bitter, offtopic gripe about how they think HN commenters are losers.

Re: Uber's Still Not Profitable

#87

Post by sfe22 »

Ekaros wrote: post #49
fleventynine wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't such a law stop Google from releasing Android as open source? AOSP cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, but it doesn't cost anything to use. In such a world, could companies even contribute patches to Linux? Making Linux better without expectation of profit could be considered predatory pricing against Microsoft.

There should be difference between releasing something for free like Open Source. And then providing real product or service for less than it costs to produce without any alternative income streams.

And what if android charged a penny a year?

Re: Uber's Still Not Profitable

#89

Post by wodenokoto »

rich_sasha wrote: post #84
yccs27 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that predatory pricing includes an expectation of future profits from that product. So it makes sense to exclude perpetual free licenses like open source from the definition.

Presumably Google benefits financially from the Android ecosystem. Play store if nothing else. You can imagine a different world where many mobile OS providers exist, charge you for the system, then comes out Google with free Android, kills the competition and then milks monopoly pricing.

Not presumably. Around the release of android, google was quoting estimated earnings in the billions of dollars from a free and open source Android, purely from capturing mobile ad views/clicks.

Re: Uber's Still Not Profitable

#90

Post by origin_path »

bschne wrote: post #14
alkonaut wrote: post #12

Predatory pricing should be made more illegal than it is. No one wins when a company operates at a loss to kill incumbents in a market. At least for markets where the incumbents have no other protections (unregulated taxi markets). This is very few of Uber’s markets and probably not those where they do best, but the principle of not being allowed to operate at a loss with investor money year after year feels sound.

This only occurred to me now in reference to Uber and other serial offenders, and I don't know what the situation in other countries is, but... In Switzerland there's actually a law against unfair competitive practices, and it has a clause prohibiting you from constantly or repeatedly (i.e. not as a one-off clearance sale or whatever) offering goods or services below cost! Wonder how it would go if you were to sue on…

Lots of countries have laws like that, not only Switzerland, but they are hardly ever enforced because it would make people very upset. Way too many things are priced below production cost like e.g. the web browsers we're using to have this conversation.

Also, although this article describes Uber as a transfer of money from "labor to capital", in reality it's been the other way around. Uber and the like have been massive transfers of money from capital to labor - that's exactly why they're unprofitable. They pay labor more money than they get from customers and make it up from investor cash. This sort of thing is very popular with voters, even if the more astute may think about the longer term effects on competition etc, most don't care. What they see is that they can order a really cheap taxi ride via a nice app, and if the government demanded it be profitable, that wouldn't exist.

Don't under-estimate how much people love free/cheap stuff. Market dumping is bad in the long run but imagine what would happen to the software world if these laws were actually enforced. Open source would probably be made illegal!

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