By comparison, the taxi & limo industry does $11 billion in sales across the entire US market.
For Uber to ever justify just this funding round, they'll probably need to become roughly the size of 1/3 the entire taxi business in terms of sales (assuming $3.x billion in sales and $600x million in profit off that base, and assuming a reasonable 20 to 30 pe ratio over time).
I'm guessing Uber is betting on selling customers a lot more than their current service offerings. There's no other way they can justify this type of valuation.
As of 2013, Uber was only generating $200 million in revenue for the entire year (according to the leaked numbers). Uber could grow crazy fast and still not justify this valuation for six or seven years. That's quite the long term bet being placed here.
Uber could be growing at 20% per month, or 9x per year, even as recently as December. That suggests they could reach the revenue target you mention in less than two years. Obviously, growth becomes dramatically harder once you become a fraction of order unity of the market, but I don't think this bet is necessarily 7 years long.
Yeah, I was going to bring this up also. Obviously there are international markets as well, and the mere existence of Uber could in itself grow the size of this industry. However, if they are expected to become Google or Facebook-sized they're going to have to tap into some other verticals.
For Uber to ever justify just this funding round, they'll probably need to become roughly the size of 1/3 the entire taxi business in terms of sales (assuming $3.x billion in sales and $600x million in profit off that base, and assuming a reasonable 20 to 30 pe ratio over time).
I'm guessing Uber is betting on selling customers a lot more than their current service offerings. There's no other way they can justify this type of valuation.
As of 2013, Uber was only generating $200 million in revenue for the entire year (according to the leaked numbers). Uber could grow crazy fast and still not justify this valuation for six or seven years. That's quite the long term bet being placed here.
http://www.ibisworld.com/industry/default.aspx?indid=1951