441–450 of 470 posts
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For FY2018, Uber reported $5.6 billion in gross profits and gross profit margins around 50%. https://craft.co/uber/metrics
So they made money as long as you ignore stuff like operating expenses..
It’s why we use multiple metrics to evaluate a business, but it’s clear that Uber has large positive gross margins.
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I would call 18 common, relative to the number of recent IPO’s over 1 Billion dollars. It’s definitely not the majority, but it’s common enough to make leverage extremely risky.
You have an odd definition of "common". That's 18 over a total of nearly 20 years. The billion threshold is for total company valuation, which at least recently is most companies listed, not amount raised.
2008 has 31 Total IPO’s, restrict that to 1+ billion and you are not talking about a huge list. Restrict that to an unusual few years and it’s easy for an abnormal but meaningless pattern to show up. But, we have no need to make such assumptions.
PS: Facebook is something of an oddity, opening day has technical issues which ended up inflating the price.
Some notes from watching Uber open: - if it closes below $45(its IPO price) it will be the first time since 2008 that the happened for a major IPO - TD Ameritrade executed more orders in the first 10 minutes of trading than they did for the first 2.5 hours with Lyft. - Uber is 9% of all trading at TD Ameritrade, retail loves this stock, - market is down today, which isn't helping Uber but its probably not much of a f…
Facebook was at ~$44 on the day it IPOed, and proceeded to fall over the next month to about $19. Today its at $187.
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So they made money as long as you ignore stuff like operating expenses..
That’s the definition of gross profit. Within operating expenses, advertising is close to a cost of profits in a way that R&D isn’t. It’s why we use multiple metrics to evaluate a business, but it’s clear that Uber has large positive gross margins.
Ignoring all other expenses and saying that a company is a good business is ignoring reality.
I’m not just choosing a method that makes Uber look bad. They are not profitable or successful based on a legal GAAP definition of profitable.
If we just cherry pick numbers, we might as well think that WeWork’s made up metric of “community adjusted EBITDA” is valid.
https://news.crunchbase.com/news/wework-details-run-rate-rev...
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They are way into debt financing and have a $25B bottom line, this is a "when you owe the bank a million dollars..." situation now, nobody involved is going to let it run out of money and throw the whole house of cards away.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that sounds like sunk cost fallacy.
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Amazon in 2016 was $502 a share, it is $1900 now Microsoft in 2016 was $51, $127 now Facebook was $97, $189 now We're not even talking about rocket-ship growth here. We are talking about option strike prices losing money in one of the most favorable economic time periods where massive, healthy public business did have monstrous growth. I would have at least expected price parity with other large companies - even that…
The Silicon Valley giants don't do options anymore, but RSUs (restricted stock units) which are simply share awards. There's no strike price to worry about, but of course it's a bit of a disappointment if you expected Uber to be a $100B company out of the gate. Still, Uber employees will be happy that they can finally sell those RSU awards (in six months when the lockup expires).
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That’s the definition of gross profit. Within operating expenses, advertising is close to a cost of profits in a way that R&D isn’t. It’s why we use multiple metrics to evaluate a business, but it’s clear that Uber has large positive gross margins.
When it comes down to it. The only thing that makes a company viable is whether they are making more money than they are spending. Ignoring all other expenses and saying that a company is a good business is ignoring reality. I’m not just choosing a method that makes Uber look bad. They are not profitable or successful based on a legal GAAP definition of profitable. If we just cherry pick numbers, we might as well thi…
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Right? This is what I don't understand. Everyone keeps saying the only way they make money is with autonomous cars but they're not even close with being able to do that (probably 5 years, at a minimum, and that's in small select areas). With such a high burn rate, what are they going to do? From everything I read they're not like Amazon where they can just "turn on" monetization unless they're going to hike up their…
When autonomous cars arrive, Uber is toast. The only actually useful moat they have is experience in managing drivers. When that goes away, car manufacturers, or even private car owners, will just flood the streets just like scooters or bike rentals now. It will just be a rather simple yet massive capital investment to put those cars on the streets, something that large, traditional companies with their far better fi…
Then you have two businesses; you manufacture cars to sell to people and you have a service arm that handles an Uber / Taxi like service with driverless cars.
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And then new competitors will spring up who can undermine those prices. There is absolutely nothing unique about what Uber does to keep people as customers.
A dominant two-sided market has strong network effects, since new suppliers want to be where the buyers already are and vice versa.
If they are employees, Uber is thoroughly fucked.