"Uber released new financial data this week, showing full year 2017 GAAP operating losses of $4.5 billion, and an operating margin of negative 61%."
Finally, Generally Accepted Accounting Principles numbers from Uber. And they're awful. Lots of startups whine about having to produce GAAP numbers (all US public companies have to) because they can't exclude "extraordinary expenses". But GAAP numbers are real, not "earnings before all the bad stuff" numbers.
Right now, Softbank is keeping Uber alive. They put in $10 billion at the end of last year.[1] Softbank is now Uber's largest shareholder.
No one in the finance or investment industry I know sets much store by GAAP numbers which has lots of weird quirks [1] and isn't really helpful understanding the business.
From what I read off the reported numbers, they made about a billion on 11 billion on collections above the line. Excluding R&D and depreciation, they spent about 1.2 billion recurring or 1.5 billion all in. That doesn't sound like a bad place for the business that's close to tripling over a few quarters to be at all.
Yup. But if you look at the reported P&L, they have grown revenue 2.5X over 6 quarters, held or slightly improved gross margins and grown op ex o slightly less than 2X in the same period. So clearly business is growing and growing healthy with a path to profitability even without invoking "self drive cars"
I've been skeptical of Uber in the past but this performance is very impressive. It's probably not Google/FB P&L level impressive but that's just applying a very stretch benchmark.
I think the 10b isn’t sales but it’s to fund whatever insurance policy that they have on their cars . They probably add that to the price of their rides or something .
Finally, Generally Accepted Accounting Principles numbers from Uber. And they're awful. Lots of startups whine about having to produce GAAP numbers (all US public companies have to) because they can't exclude "extraordinary expenses". But GAAP numbers are real, not "earnings before all the bad stuff" numbers.
Right now, Softbank is keeping Uber alive. They put in $10 billion at the end of last year.[1] Softbank is now Uber's largest shareholder.
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/uber/funding_rounds/...