
Uber’s Financials: An Inside Look - scop
https://www.wsj.com/graphics/uber-financials/
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saas_co_de
One of the things I find interesting is how they treat bookings like revenue.

In reality Uber is just like Visa. They are a transaction processor.

Visa does not report revenue of trillions of dollars per year.

For Uber actual revenue is somewhere between "Gross Profit" (865M) and "Net
Revenue" (2B) and then their actual operating expenses are between 2B and 3.2B
depending on what you call revenue and cost of revenue.

The bottom line is that they are taking huge losses for relatively small
amounts of revenue.

Reporting your transaction volume as revenue is really infantile and should
get you laughed out of the room, but here we are.

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drsim
Agreed for their current model. However Uber is very different to Visa.

What's the endgame for Uber? Surely that's operating an autonomous fleet. No
drivers. Visa will always have merchants, but Uber will not always have
drivers.

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bunderbunder
I have a hard time seeing that as an endgame that Uber is well-positioned to
win at.

Right now, Uber's core competencies are having a nice app, and managing a
bunch of people-centric things like recruiting drivers and getting them to be
available to drive at times when people want rides. Of those two, the latter
is probably the more difficult one to clone. It's also useless to a company
that doesn't employ any drivers.

What they have close to zero competency in is fleet management. That's
something for which traditional cab companies have something approaching a 100
year head start, and they which are very good at.

I think that's the reason why Uber has decided that it's so critical that they
develop their own self-driving car technology: They need to control a supply
of self-driving cars during the critical transition period if they want to
avoid being at a disadvantage while it's happening. If everyone's buying
commodity self-driving cars from a big automaker, then it's just a game of who
can operate most efficiently in order to offer the lowest prices. Traditional
cab companies were already good at that, and, if anything, the influence of
Uber on their market over the past however many years has forced them to get
even better at it.

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andrewjl
Whether or not the company has drivers, the data on who rides where and how
much it costs to meet that demand via local driving pool is valuable. And Uber
has by far the biggest data set on the planet. (They are active in more cities
than Lyft.)

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thisisit
This is really a replay of the 3rd Quarter results:

[http://fortune.com/2017/11/29/uber-financials-loss-
softbank/](http://fortune.com/2017/11/29/uber-financials-loss-softbank/)

The point is while losses were $1.4 billion, the free cash flow was actually
negative $585 million. At this rate, excluding the Softbank investment, it
will take Uber more than 4 years before they run out of money.

~~~
rileymat2
So why take on additional money if you plan on going public soon?

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brndnmtthws
Best way to get rich is to be rich. They can buy their way to success.

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gregshap
Some takeaways:

* Close to $10B in gross bookings, which in a back of the envelope guess means 5-10 million rides per day (assuming $10-$20 per ride) If anything maybe more as 'pool' options get more popular.

* Slower growth for Uber means they are still increasing topline bookings by 10+% per quarter

* Uber's reported R&D spending is around 15% of revenue. The proportion is comparable to companies like google & microsoft, but uber is still 10x smaller overall

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golfer
Gross bookings: $9.705 billion versus $8.741 billion last quarter (up 11%).

Net revenue: $2.013 billion versus $1.658 billion last quarter (up 21%).

Net income: -$1.462 billion versus -$1.064 billion last quarter.

Total assets (including cash, cash equivalents, investments, and more): $15.64
billion versus $15.708 billion a year ago.

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greenleafjacob
[http://archive.is/P4Kl5](http://archive.is/P4Kl5)

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lgats
Alternatively, [https://www.fullwsj.com/graphics/uber-
financials/](https://www.fullwsj.com/graphics/uber-financials/)

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aglionby
A warning that this link redirects through Facebook for me for some reason.

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ngoel36
That's the point :). (WSJ doesn't apply the paywall for social media links)

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kbenson
Firefox containers really helped with this (the worry of going through
Facebook, that is). I have a Facebook Container (which facebook always opens
in), and a News Container (which I just set WSJ to always open in. The
redirect goes through both containers, and facebook obviously sees the
referral and knows where I was redirected to (since it confirms I want to
leave FB), but at least when I end up at WSJ any _direct_ Facebook tracking
links (cookies) aren't shuttled with me (they just have to rely on their
massive dataset of information to link me as they would for any random
request, which I'm sure they can...)

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nathanvanfleet
If the endgame is an autonomous fleet, you just might want to show people how
big of a market this is and how much you're capturing.

