Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Uber Says Sales Growth Outpaces Losses

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 141 posts

Re: Uber Says Sales Growth Outpaces Losses

#91

Post by pfarnsworth »

petra wrote: post #47
slackstation wrote: post #15

Sales growth in commodity product that is loosing money on ever sale? I'll never understand this. Uber won't own the market. There is zero lock-in. If Lyft is cheaper this week, I'm riding Lyft. I sold my car over a year ago and use a mix of ridesharing and rentals for transportation. Uber and Lyft's greatest competition in my life is a small Google product where people pick up people on their daily commute to and fr…

There's no lock in, because Uber failed in the most important category of their business - true ride sharing, a business with strong network effect, while others(ridewithvia, ford chariot) are already succeeding with true, high-density ride-sharing, with others companies(moovex, mercedes, ..) are working on their own service. And chariot i think started in 2014, so Uber is very slow to respond, not sure why.

Chariot is doing exactly the same thing as Uber, ie. subsidizing all the rides to get a low price. But they don't have the same network effects, they will go out of business soon.

Re: Uber Says Sales Growth Outpaces Losses

#92

Post by pfarnsworth »

nebabyte wrote: post #77
codecamper wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does HN limit the depth of replies? Just to keep the page looking snappy & fresh? That's pretty awesome that you guys thought of hosting videos. The idea escaped me, even after watching photo.net & then Flickr. I was working on an idea back then & the issue was the cost of bandwidth, right? Sure.. put videos on the Internet... but how would you ever pay for that much bandwidth? I guess that's why a Silicon valley…

> Why does HN limit the depth of replies? OH. I felt like I was going insane reading some of the comments that seemed like they had no context. Ha. (Now to figure out what the proper ordering is? Unless it's deleted) Thanks for the context

He deleted his initial post. He claimed to have written a taxi app early on, and regrets not finishing it.

Re: Uber Says Sales Growth Outpaces Losses

#93

Post by aianus »

Denzel wrote: post #83
monkmartinez wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there are people that think Tesla is doomed. You can't run losses forever and expect to keep the lights on. I don't know what is so hard to understand, it is simple math. They, Tesla, are not "successful" in any sense of the word as it relates to financial stability.

You're conflating the basic unit economic principles of fixed vs. variable costs. And you're ignoring the breakeven point. A company that loses money on every unit sale has no breakeven point (Uber). A company that makes money on every unit sale has a breakeven point (Tesla). Because Tesla's fixed costs are very high, their breakeven point is out there, and thus they must operate at a loss for a period of time. Now t…

> A company that loses money on every unit sale has no breakeven point (Uber)

What? Uber spends an additional ~$0 on every additional ride. They only lose money because of growth and price wars with the competition.

In mature markets with no competition (eg. Toronto) there are no driver incentives or bonuses and they are still cheap and popular with riders and drivers alike.

Re: Uber Says Sales Growth Outpaces Losses

#94

Post by hawkice »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #26
code4tee wrote: post #19

Uber is demonstrating that they can sell $2 bills for a buck and that there's demand for that. They've not demonstrated they can establish a real business here in what has turned into a pure commodity market. In competitive markets a lot of "me too" competitors pop up all the time. When you see consumers just picking the one that's the cheapest (i.e. with the most VC cash subsidizing the ride) and drivers rocking up…

Quibble: having multiple phones is not gaming companies; they're independent contractors, remember? You work for whoever provides the best compensation at that moment. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

It's possible he meant game in a deeper, street-philosophy sense, in that the drivers are playing the game and Uber is playing the fool.

Re: Uber Says Sales Growth Outpaces Losses

#95

Post by prostoalex »

xseven wrote: post #76
prostoalex wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the fifth year you think you're gonna spend $6 and make $10. And now you're profitable. In theory yes, but tracking the the progress of UberChina http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/18/uber-losing-1-billion-a-year-... , situation in Denmark or Spain, inability to win market share from established players in Russia, India or Malaysia introduce some real-world corrections to an otherwise ideal business plan.

> inability to win market share from established players in Russia, India or Malaysia Any concrete data on this other than for news articles?

A good amount of companies operating in the space are private, guarding their financials as much as possible, so the field is not well covered by analysts, especially in emerging markets. I guess there's not enough incentive for an analyst, investment bank or brokerage house to pay for such research until someone in the field goes public. So unfortunately, we're restricted to random news articles.

Here's NYT on India https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/technology/uber-india.htm...

"On top of all this is competition. Uber faces an aggressive and well-funded Indian rival, Ola Cabs, which operates in 100 cities and offers a wider range of services than Uber does."

RT (okay, not the best source of non-fake news, but this is covering business and referring to a third-party report, so even with a grain of salt) https://www.rt.com/business/312513-yandex-taxi-uber-revenue/

"Russia's most popular search engine has not only beaten Google on its home turf, but has now left Uber in the dust in the Russian taxi market. The company has announced that its online-taxi services’ revenue has tripled in the second quarter of 2015. The Yandex.Taxi fleet has more than 15,000 vehicles in Moscow compared to 10,000 for its Israeli competitor Gett and America’s Uber with 3,000."

Analysis of Singapore market suggests that the playbook consisting of lowering the prices to undercut the taxi establishment works well in countries with expensive taxi services that limit medallions, not so well in countries with dirt-cheap and readily available taxi services http://sbr.com.sg/transport-logistics/news/sorry-uber-and-gr...

"the extremely high taxi penetration rate in Singapore means that it is less difficult for commuters to get a taxi in Singapore than in other cities, making it harder than elsewhere for Uber/Grab to get jobs for its drivers during off-peak hours."

Re: Uber Says Sales Growth Outpaces Losses

#96

Post by andrewljohnson »

jacquesm wrote: post #64
codecamper wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does HN limit the depth of replies? Just to keep the page looking snappy & fresh? That's pretty awesome that you guys thought of hosting videos. The idea escaped me, even after watching photo.net & then Flickr. I was working on an idea back then & the issue was the cost of bandwidth, right? Sure.. put videos on the Internet... but how would you ever pay for that much bandwidth? I guess that's why a Silicon valley…

Well, to be honest, the cost of bandwidth was one of the factors that caused me to nix the project, we were having enough bandwidth problems as it was (we got kicked off the international backbone because the webcams saturated it). Was the first iteration of Google really written in Python? That's quite interesting.

Pretty sure it was Java: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.java/aSPAJO0...

Re: Uber Says Sales Growth Outpaces Losses

#97

Post by hawkice »

Losses up 6% and they're celebrating. I've been at companies like this. "We're losing money faster than ever, if I keep saying words after that you might be confused as to whether that matters."

And if you have new or growing product lines that incorporate into both revenue and expenses like Uber Pool does, you'd see exactly this shift _without a change in the underlying unit economics_. Which means that, not only are they losing money faster than ever, but they have no mechanism to stop the bleeding.

Re: Uber Says Sales Growth Outpaces Losses

#98

Post by toomuchtodo »

hawkice wrote: post #94
toomuchtodo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quibble: having multiple phones is not gaming companies; they're independent contractors, remember? You work for whoever provides the best compensation at that moment. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

It's possible he meant game in a deeper, street-philosophy sense, in that the drivers are playing the game and Uber is playing the fool.

My understanding was that Uber had/has a system called "Hell" that could uniquely identify Lyft drivers based on fiticious rider requests Uber would send, and then use that data to target those Lyft drivers to drive exclusively for Uber.

Uber most definitely wasn't playing the fool.

Re: Uber Says Sales Growth Outpaces Losses

#99

Post by temp20160423 »

prostoalex wrote: post #63
georgespencer wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The naivety on HN is staggering sometimes. Imagine your parents give you a $10 loan to start a lemonade stand. You think you need six years to make them an above market return on their investment of 2x. You're gonna buy cups, lemons, sugar, and water. In the first year you think you're going to spend $3 and make $0. So you have $7 in the bank. In the second year you think you're gonna spend $2, and make $1. So you ha…

> In the fifth year you think you're gonna spend $6 and make $10. And now you're profitable. In theory yes, but tracking the the progress of UberChina http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/18/uber-losing-1-billion-a-year-... , situation in Denmark or Spain, inability to win market share from established players in Russia, India or Malaysia introduce some real-world corrections to an otherwise ideal business plan.

You should read Brad Stone's The Upstarts. The outcome in China is actually pretty favorable for Uber. One-line summary: Travis (not Uber, but Travis) probably owns as much of Didi as the current founder/CEO of Didi. Didi is currently valued >$30B.

Re: Uber Says Sales Growth Outpaces Losses

#100

Post by cmahler7 »

codecamper wrote: post #52
georgespencer wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've raised $15bn in total and their last valuation was about $70bn. In total they've lost around $6bn, meaning that between cash and credit facilities they have around $8-9bn in the bank.

And when they need to make profit they can easily fire about 90% of their workforce & keep the machine humming in place.

can they? Their valuation is entirely based on self-driving cars, if they fire everybody and give up on that it's over for them.
Post reply on HN