Uber Eats revenue in 2018 is $1.46B which is pretty impressive regarding other income: > Gain on divestitures increased by $3.2 billion from 2017 to 2018. This increase was due to gains on the divestitures of our Russia/CIS and Southeast Asia operations. Covered on page 85, basically spinoffs with other regional leaders
I'm surprised that Eats is doing more revenue than GrubHub and much more revenue than Caviar.
well, uber eats is in a lot of countries that grubhub is
So... Let me see if I have this straight: 1. Uber is unprofitable and the only way it can become profitable is to get SDC's 2. Uber is significantly (years) behind Waymo in the SDC space. 3. Waymo will launch SDC taxi services first meaning: - When it puts in an order for SDC components no one else is going to be buying in bulk and thus it can have effectively 100% of capacity of these specialized equipment makers -…
Can't Uber become profitable by raising prices and lowering costs? They have $40B in gross rideshare bookings and $3B in real losses for 2018. Let's assume 20% of their costs are fixed and 80% are variable. What might happen if they raise prices by 10%? Gross bookings drop by 20% / Revenue per booking increase by 10% => $35.2B in gross bookings Variable costs drop by 30% (due to lower driver acquisition costs since t…
you sound like a CEO.
this analysis is... insane. your numbers aren't estimations, they're just nonsense. a state of oversupplied drivers is not at equilibrium, the drivers are going to leave until they're not supplied anymore. oops, now you have to acquire drivers again.
Quick note that Facebook, unfortunately, has no real competitor for the sheer number of things it does. As soon as one comes out built for non-technical users the way Facebook is - and hopefully is a nonprofit - I’ll go running to it and encourage my friends, too.
I’d want one that’s just an online account with a single picture, name, address, phone number that lets you have friends. No posting - basically just a contact list that’s always up to date because people update themselves. Keybase could be this. The main way to get people in would be a focus on event scheduling relying on twilio and sms for including users that don’t have accounts. Make it cheap but not free ($1/mon…
Could LinkedIn go this way...bridge from its business network to casual social network also?
If we're just making up numbers why not assume you'll only drop gross bookings by 0%, or increase bookings even! Anything can be made profitable if you just invent numbers.
They aren't pulled out of thin air. They're best estimates. If you disagree, what do you think their unit model would transform into if they acquired lyft for $20B in stock and raised prices by 10%? Why?
> if you disagree, riddle me something entirely different
I always felt SDC is the death of Uber. If you had 5 billion to invest in SDCs for a taxi service, why would you become a small investor in Uber, when you could probably build the app for $10 million and just roll your own? Also uber could become profitable if they charged more. I've actually started taking taxi's again, since they are marginally more expensive than Ubers/Lyfts. However, if you pick them up from an a…
> I always felt SDC is the death of Uber. But aren't SDCs currently something veeery remote (e.g. even Tesla cannot currently drive autonomously even on technically "simple streets" like highways) and especially only as long as no active offensive social behaviours start to emerge (e.g. gang menbers standing in the middle of the street to stop a SDC to rob/kidnap the occupant and/or destroy the car etc...)?
I agree its very far away, except for interstate driving. I can see an SDC-only lane, with a faster top speed. Residential, taxi-cab driving is so far away. Hey, if I step in front of this car, I don't get to sue a fairly poor driver, I get to sue a mega-corp for a tonne of money cause the algorithm should have stopped.
Horrible numbers! They cannot get the unit economics to work. In order to make up for that fundamental flaw, they are trying to throw a number of things at the wall(UberEats/UberFrieght/SD/Bikes/etc) and see if something sticks. Each of those other bets seems poor, thus far. They better focus on getting their original business in shape(call a cab via an app). I would be curious to know if they tried to raise prices i…
>I would be curious to know if they tried to raise prices in any markets and what the results were
You know they did, and if the results were good they would have done it across the board.
> It takes tremendous capital expenditure to build that network, and it will take tremendous capital expenditure to neutralize it. Does it, though? Every driver I've talked to basically drives for "all of them". Several told me they try to find whatever apps are local for driving and they setup those alone with Uber and Lyft and simply take whatever pays the most / is more frequent. Uber's software and network are so…
Is there a valid comparison between Uber and a company like Amazon? Amazon's loss leader strategy paid off and they're doing well now, so can Uber "become profitable whenever they want to" and be fine?
Huge barriers to entry to compete with Amazon (warehouses, tech). Thus no serious direct competitor. Few barriers to entry in ride business (just another app)
> Merely being ahead of competitors isn't a moat No competitor can catch up without heavily subsidizing both drivers and riders. If no competitor is willing to spend billions to steal 20% of the market, then that's a pretty effective moat.
In VC parlance, a "moat" means something much more than just needing money to enter the market, but an insurmountable barrier even with a lot of money.
The network effects are the moat, and it would take a lot of money to disrupt that.
Any given market can't sustain more than a 2 or 3 rideshare services because splitting the network makes it too sparse for drivers and riders to match within a few seconds or minutes.
Uber has the #1 or #2 spot in virtually every market. That's an economic moat if I ever saw one.
> can't imagine how Uber is worth anything If the operation doesn't make an economic profit, and if there isn't sufficient moat to defend the operation until it can become profitable, then I agree with you it's not worth anything. But in fact, Uber does have a massive moat -- its network of drivers and riders in thousands of cities around the world. No competitor is even close. It takes tremendous capital expenditure…
What moat? All the driver needs to do is load another app on their phone.
What moat? All the user has to do is change the search engine to Bing from Google.