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Does anyone have any idea why Uber isn't profitable? I never really understood that. It's such a ubiquitous service in a large portion of the world. It seems to me that they have a lot of physical growth, so what is happening to their finances?
Does anyone have any idea why Uber isn't profitable? I never really understood that. It's such a ubiquitous service in a large portion of the world. It seems to me that they have a lot of physical growth, so what is happening to their finances?
Does anyone have any idea why Uber isn't profitable? I never really understood that. It's such a ubiquitous service in a large portion of the world. It seems to me that they have a lot of physical growth, so what is happening to their finances?
Does anyone have any idea why Uber isn't profitable? I never really understood that. It's such a ubiquitous service in a large portion of the world. It seems to me that they have a lot of physical growth, so what is happening to their finances?
This is the story of just about every Valley startup. Seemingly greater losses the larger the userbase grows. When asking how this is possible, everyone will answer "you just don't understand, this is a good thing."
> 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.
Does anyone have any idea why Uber isn't profitable? I never really understood that. It's such a ubiquitous service in a large portion of the world. It seems to me that they have a lot of physical growth, so what is happening to their finances?
Most Uber rides are priced below cost to try and drive growth. Or at least, that was the original story they told. Lately it seems more like “Uber rides are priced below cost, because if we price them any higher users will flee to a different ride-hailing service, because we have no lock-in or switching costs”. Uber’s entire business model is selling dollar bills for 90 cents and it’s all going to come apart shortly.
Does anyone have any idea why Uber isn't profitable? I never really understood that. It's such a ubiquitous service in a large portion of the world. It seems to me that they have a lot of physical growth, so what is happening to their finances?
Does anyone have any idea why Uber isn't profitable? I never really understood that. It's such a ubiquitous service in a large portion of the world. It seems to me that they have a lot of physical growth, so what is happening to their finances?
Uber's main expense is the driver. The vehicles pretty much always stay the same size so they don't actually benefit from economies of scale. And drivers (and customers) are fickle; most drivers and customers have more than one app on their phone. If Uber hikes prices or slashes driver compensation people will just leave. Uber has a growth story if you believe that AVs are just around the corner, but that's a pretty big if.
Uber mostly made it to the IPO with the help of Softbank, one of if not its largest shareholders. Softbank had a $100B Vision Fund. With that kind of money you could be unprofitable for a while and still be a going concern.
> 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.
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 is today. Scaling/automating those jobs was always an inevitable.