Uber runs a few data centers and a customer service center overseas. The Uber drivers assume ALL the expenses of the vehicle, gasoline, insurance, repairs, etc. And Uber takes a big chunk of the money that customers pay for a ride. There is no way Uber Corporation is losing billions of dollars. Some seriously *creative* accounting is going on here .
is it loss making for some other investments that in turns loop the loop back to Uber or UberSt of Investing...it is practically one of the best inventions of modern times along with vac robots how can it not be milking it some what maybe not at the start but now after it is being living language like google something....unless its going into energy industries to loop on some creative selling but honestly the only few subscriptions for life that I want are Uber, Utube and home all in one robots that one gets an updated one every 5 years but you buy the lifetime program upfront (its gambling a bit I know with the robot companies but isn't every investment some kind of gamble at least it will keep the place looking somewhat better even when the worst happens)...unless it is being funneled into data centers and then sold to ad companies or analytics because big brothers like to know all the secret places you been to in these funky cabs
The problem is when drivers don’t take that crap anymore and start doing privet rides , means the meddle men Is off the table , and that’s we are seeing more and more everyday everywhere
As a product designer/manager, I hate it so much. I actively avoid companies that burn money constantly. They pay good salaries. But seems like, they burn the money to force the market in an unnatural direction. Everyone loses in the end, except CEOs 💀
Taxis are a bad idea. Modest profits are the ceiling. Uber eats is a terrible idea. Cars aren't a new invention. You might say food delivery already existed. That is completely different. 3rd party food delivery is a completely different service than a restaurant delivering their own food. It's extremely expensive and customers will never pay the actual costs. It just isn't worth it.
It honestly one of the greatest wonders of our world... How can Uber, who takes around half the price of a fare be unprofitable? Is server upkeep that expensive? Where is Uber throwing away money they get for doing almost nothing? So, if Uber as a whole can't operate at a profit, where does that leave individual drivers? All uber does is provide a forum for drivers and passengers to communicate and make transactions. They do not pay for repairs, oil changes, or even fuel for the vehicles that literally drive their business. The fact that uber can fail to make a profit should be a critique of our system at large.
In London, Addison Lee are the largest traditional mini-cab operator, they have been around since the 1970s. They have an app that you can book taxis on, the cost is about the same as Über, and they make pretty decent profits. They also pay all the required taxes on their income and comply with minimum wage laws etc. The only advantage that Über really has over them is that tourists are more likely to already have the Über app on their phone and don't have to download a new app and set up a new account, and don't have to discover that Addison Lee is the big operator in London.
I think a big issue is how similar Uber and Lyft are. To me, there is practically no difference, so if I have to make a trip I'll just use the cheaper app.
They wasted 2-3 billion on PostMates which was circulating the drain. Plowing their first profit into a stock buyback was annoying too. Ghost & virtual kitchens are absurd complications & dilution to the real brands.
@@strangelaw6384 They're like how Mr. Beast gets his burgers out. They put a logo and a menu in the apps and then places like Red Robin make the burgers. One chain restaurant that might specialize in burgers but will have a fake name on the app as like WingZone! or a seafood menu specialization called Crabbies or a salad specialization called Mean Green. Customers can't tell most of the time whether it's a real wing chain or if it's just a fake name at a burger place. All the extra fake restaurants just clutter the apps & aren't specialists in the extra food genres they're cranking out.
A buyback and a dividend are identical. Many people invest with fractional shares and automatic reinvestment, so it's _really_ identical. If you want to sell, you sell.
Uber's greatest success was circumnavigating pre-existing worker regulations and proudly calling themselves industry disruptors. Let's us not forget LA and San Francisco, and NY were against it until the politicians were paid off.
All that means is that Uber and Lyft had deeper pockets than corrupt taxi companies. If you don't think politicians were getting paid off by owners of taxi companies, you're naive.
The main problem is that anything electrical is called a Tech company, and is compared against a real tech company. Tesla is not a Tech company, it is a simple Car manufacturer. Uber is not a Tech company, Uber is in the Transport Buisiness. Just because you use an app for your service doesn't make you a tech company. My Bank has an app as well, but I would not call it a Tech company.
Nope. Car manufacturers make cars, transport companies hire drivers and haul something... tesla sells hype, uber sales app service, not car or ride. Uber does not own cars nor hire drivers, its the very idea of the gesheft - to be just service company, not regulated and having absolutely no contacts with customers, only as payment system. So they are tech and finance company. Tesla makes something metal and plastic, of course, but it is not the core of the business. And its the reason why uber margin is so small - its not uber revenue but uber drivers. $100 gained - $98 given out to drivers. $0.01 spent to app development and servers, $1.99 profit. 100% plan but very fragile, as any non-operation expense like court payments not included, and if they arise everuthing breaks
One of the reason. is 4000 engineers, with 6-7 figures wages. Total they have 31000 employees with high operational costs. The margins on there products are way to low, to be a healthy company... But they don't make profit, they burn it all.
@@doujinflip tons of operating cost along with regulations along with paying taxes to operate. I rented my cab at 911 dollars a week, I grossed before expensives 400 dollars a day on a normal day. My cab cost me 135 dollars a day because it was hybrid. The gas was cheap and the money i paid for maintenance and other things. I worked hard but wasnt any thing like Uber makes you do.... you have to be nonstop in Uber to make any money. In a cab if i had nonstop rides I was making more than 400 dollars i was making 600 hundred
Where are their expenses even coming from?!? Nothing uber does requires bay area engineers. They could go to literally any other state / city and pay less.
FWIW, in 2024 Engineers (and their entire R & D division) is only $790 million - sales was more at $917 million, and general/administrative was $1,209 million. If they stopped marketing, cut ga expenses, and cut some engineers to stop developing new features, Uber could be quite profitable overnight. But, at least for now, they are still trying to grow. They have a 40% gross margin, so if they trimmed the fat, you could easily be at a 25-30% net margin. That's insane. Hardly a low-margin business! The play here is to dominate first, then extract value. Remains to be seen if it can be done - it's not that hard to make a local Uber with lower expenses and lower margins, thus undercutting them to draw customers. From there you can spread city to city.
One big expensive are servers, you need a server near enough an user to it be fast enough. You wouldn’t use Uber if took 3 minutes to call the car and the competition was in 1. Is already know that speed of a software is important, to see that, search the amount of code totally rewritten to make it faster. Now that we know the speed factor, to achieve this speed is necessary multiple servers that can handle it, in different country’s, with different legal system’s. Is kinda of a nightmare
@@crazy1be The fact we haven't seen any real competitors to lyft and uber yet is very worrying. I believe that such a competitor could be profitable purely through selling ad space on the app, letting drivers and passengers set their own prices.
The problem is that they're taking responsibility for the whole car ride, not just the software that matchmakes rider with driver. That burdens them with the need to keep hiring more people to deal with customer service, legal compliance per region (sometimes per city even), accidents/insurance, and recruiting drivers as they expand. Think of how much money and staff Craigslist, for example, would need if they were responsible for making sure every transaction is safely and legally carried out for both buyer and seller.
Anyone who has some experience in the food industry knows that the profitability of Uber scales linearly with the number of riders, which means that it cannot scale like tech companies.
Does anyone else remember when Uber created a program so that government IPs/phones couldn't book a trip, making it seem like there were no drivers available to avoid charges? 🤣🤣
They don't own the cars and they don't employ the drivers. They are a software as a service provider, which seems pretty much a digital tech company. They just have really over invested in this in order to grow their company valuations. That seems pretty much the story of a lot of "tech companies". It is just that advertising and selling add-ons or subscriptions doesn't work with the taxi service software systems, unlike what has bailed out other tech companies like Amazon, Google, NetFlix, etc.
It's giant taxi cab hailing service. Not a lot of margin in that business. At least it stops pretending to be a high-tech company. (Remember it was pretending to work on FSD?)
There is more than enough margin for an entity to extract 40% of a fare price without supplying any equipment or paying for vehicle maintenance. The issue is wasting money on advertising and pointless "expansion". Uber and lyft are the two players in the game, any money spent by either is practically burnt. I am certain that a company could serve a 30 second ad and then allow users to find a ride and make a profit strictly from ad revenue. The free market doesn't work when you have mega corps going billions of dollars into debt just to secure the market and their future profits.
you are clueless. uber is making 70-80 percent of the ride. paying drivers (who incur the expenses) are getting 20-30 percent. it’s a scam to steal the equity from people’s cars. taxi industry had to maintain vehicles, uber does not. taxi could benefit from economy of scale, individuals can not. there’s not a chance uber survives as a company. the mass of drivers will eventually figure out the scam, rise up in revolution and probably slaughter uber execs for wage theft. uber is too stupid to realize this. if you invested in uber you will lose.
I genuinely don't understand how they aren't profitable profitable it makes no sense to me it's basically a restaurant business but like without any of the expensive overhead other than employees and marketing
I honestly don't understand why you're discussing these dubious schemes. There are plenty of options like Eledator and similar ones that are fast and profitable.
Still, what Uber does as a service and the revolution it started is one of the most concrete value propositions in the B2C space. Can't imagine moving around cities without Uber today
Finance always make the accountants make the company on a loss, so a loosing company can’t be taxed. The board of directors probably pay themselves big bonuses to make the company on a loss.
Held their stock for a while but was mad when they would tank and no real sign of profitability. Too many red flags sold at $60 so 1.5x my money but man it was wild stressful ride. Learned the hard way stick to good forever businesses
you know this is a bash video right? Every point he said can be debunked. Big player paid him to scare away retail investors like us,I didn't fall for this BS, Uber stocks are long term hold, think 10 years.
They created a market based on a race to the bottom but short of eliminating labor via completely autonomous vehicles, the model isn’t realistic. And even WHEN those vehicles arrive it’s going to cost billions to get a fleet going at the scale Uber operates now.
@@JiggyJones0I like the personalities of my Lyft drivers better than the drivers over at Uber. Also Lyft used to be cheaper 75% of the time for me, however now Uber is cheaper 85% of the time, but these drivers are plain dry.
I really need ride share because I'm to point where I don't really need to own a car. I put less than 200 miles a month on the car I currently have, but my insurance is $2100 dollars a year. I do use Uber occasionally because I don't really like driving. When I use Uber, I pay $25 or tip %30, which ever is more. I can usually get a ride within 5 to 10 minutes. I've never tried Lyft.
I wonder how until long companies that grow valuations by increasing market share while losing money become case studies in business schools? My guess is that it will be after the "great reset" or the civil war or the "New-New-Deal". I remember being laughed at when I advocated for my company, Dow Chemical, to get a service provide to pay for developing software so that they could grow their market share even though we wanted them to provide us the software for free. Now days, it seems like this is a common business strategy.
This certainly sounds good too, but I think it's still worth considering more reliable options like copy trading platforms such as Eledator, for example.
They're popular because they can bring in a huge amount of revenue in a short amount of time. They do this by blowing through absurd amounts of money to swallow marketshare. This endeavor is funded by revenue, but mostly by outside parties that hope to pump the valuations up, and then sell their shares while its big. I will say that this is something thats pretty much been exclusive to start ups that seek to either get bought out or pump and dump. Uber going on for as long as it has with little in signs of some of profitably isn't normal. Its a practice that I've seen die down a bit since few companies have been able to actually pull it off. The largest company off the top of my head to pull it off was Amazon, but that's been mostly attributed to AWS taking off rather than its e-commerce unit.
Uber, Netflix, Spotify, RU-vid, etc. What people don't understand is the long-term business model. 1. Re-invent cabs, movie rentals, music distribution 2. Do it at a loss, disrupt legacy (profitable, proven) business models, gain market share though low cost and convenience 3. Once legacy businesses are gone or market share reduced, you are in control, raise prices, mine and sell customer data, pay creators, drivers, artists less, introduce legacy business model tactics (eg: ads and tiered service models) Uber was not supposed to "make money" in steps 1 or 2. Only now with driver pay reduced, surge pricing, 6+ levels of Uber service and the legacy taxi companies mostly gone, now it's time. It was never prestigious to be a taxi driver... yet somehow being an Uber driver was, for a little while anyway. Well, it's not cool anymore. It's just another low paying, long hour job, just like being a taxi driver was. If you pay for Spotify, RU-vid, Netflix, etc.... don't complain, because YOU are enabling this.
At one point in time Uber was spending huge amounts of money building their own data centers. Whereas other SAAS companies were using infrastructure providers like AWS. When they grew they had to pay increasingly large amounts of money to Amazon but they could scale it back as demand scaled deck. The thing about an app is when you expand you don't necessarily have to hire more software engineers if your app is architected in an efficient way You just scale horizontally of course adding features means utilizing engineers, maintenance means utilizing engineers etc but it doesn't mean that adding 10 million more users means you have to hire x scale amount of engineers to service them. If the app is developed to scale horizontally and is not a monolith you just apply more resources and deploy more instances. I can't conclude that Mark was smart and turning down an initial investment in Uber because he certainly would have made a great deal of money had he held on to it and sold it at the right time even if he didn't believe in it rising in value forever
Mark Cuban had the opportunity to invest in Uber at 10 million valuation?? Thats like 13,567 times earnings lol. 100,000 invested would have been 1,356,700,000
It warms my heart every time I hear about Uber problems! Talk about throwing Billions to solve a problem that didn't exist only to create new problems. I've never had an Uber ride, and if I decide TakeAway, I go out and take it away myself 🤣
Uber is really convenient for occasional use, and is typically more pleasant that taxis. I've used Uber to get a ride to the auto parts store, or to go pick up a car I've bought, or just get around during a business trip. But basically, the business model is getting around government regulation of taxi service (a good) and riding the collapse of the economy via employment moving to the gig economy (a bad). Nothing justifies these inflated company valuations for what ought to be an open source system built upon common platforms. But that applies to pretty much all of the digital economy.
I don't understand why no one points out the fact that Uber has been free cash flow positive for the last 5 quarter already. It's FCF is already 1.4B last quarter. Who says they are still a loss leader?
I'm going to guess those companies aren't burning tens of billions of dollars to try to, in their own little way, take over the world. Uber wants to be the #1 ride sharing, food delivery, electric scooter rental, and whatever else they can think of app in every major (and minor) city around the globe.
It can't ever profit, their model is severaly flawed. In Livery there were already razor thin margins for taxi and shuttle companies. In fact I worked for a huge company where the shuttle didnt make any profit and was there to please the customers. Most of the money the companies made was based on the rental of the taxi or having your own car and putting the name of your taxi on the side. Uber falls into the problem of not understanding that the reason they are losing money is cab companies which Uber is dont spend money on salaries
Imagine an industry that was as regulated by state and federal law to the extent of the taxi industry. Now see that industry destroyed overnight by a competitor who had no such restrictions or responsibility. The lesson is a deeply disturbing one ; the rules you are forced to follow may offer you no protection in the end .
Not really sure what is the base for the overall these of this video. I’d understand it 1 year ago, the all video ignore the earning last year of 1.9B which makes Uber valuation high but not crazy. May be i miss something
I quite strange though. I think a lot of people will be worse off some days without a ride shate app. I think its really expensive. But it comes in clutch when your out with the homies drinking. I guess we should just drive drunk. Taxis aren't an option in most of the US.
The problem is wasting money on research and development of products that haven’t shown results yet. They need to give up on self driving and other automated expensive delivery products and wait for another company to deal with that and buy the rights afterwards
I just don’t see how a company that can’t turn a profit can continue to exist. just shows how broken these tech startups are cause the people at the top still make so much money they still don’t care as long as investors stay on their knees for them.
When an industrious newcomer to our country worked slavishly to create a better life the pinnacle of his success was being the high bidder at a taxi medallion auction . Financing the purchase with a bank mortgage was the only way to pay ( highest price for a single medallion ;1.2 million dollars) . His ability to pay depended only on his hard work . Fast forward a few years when Ride sharing companies destroyed the taxi industry. His investment was worthless, his hard work could no longer be relied on to make his life better , and the agencies who governed and regulated his business offered no protection. Bankrupt and beaten he parked his cab on a tall bridge , threw the keys into the water below and made the last call on his cellphone to Uber for a ride home …..no.. just kidding.. he jumped .
Don’t link the number of microservices to the complexity of the business. It’s just a design decision, Netflix could have create the same number of them. It doesn’t mean anything.
Not profitable company? Are you out of your mind? They keep 60% and paying driver 40% and this is not profitable company? They even know how to avoid and not to pay taxes in USA because main office is in Europe.
I don’t see Uber turning a profit until they can replace their labor costs VIA self driving vehicles. Granted, I don’t think fully autonomous driving is that far away (on a national scale; in every city). I’m not angel investor or CEO, but when I watch all in and hear Jason talk about his Uber shares I laugh because as I see Uber it’s currently a fire pit of a company
I don't remember where I read this, but that is actually a factor as to why Uber is still unprofitable: they thought that by now (actually, by a few years ago), it would be all self-driving cars, so there would be no need to pay for drivers.
There's absolutely no way Uber could be losing money. Their only expenses are developing an app, maintaining a server, and paying people $0.14/hour at their foreign call centers. They don't pay for cars. They don't pay for gas or maintenance on said cars, they don't pay for drivers, they don't pay for insurance on the cars or their employees, and on top of all this they're making $40+ on average per trip. There's no way it costs them anywhere near $40. The bandwidth/network traffic required for an Uber ride costs like $0.00004. What other expenses do they have? Unless they're blowing tens of billions of dollars a year on television ads for Boomers (because let's be real, who else watches television in 2024?), there's no way they're actually spending that money. They must be hiding it away in offshore accounts or maybe their servers are owned by another company, which they also own and they're paying 100,000x more than what it actually costs to host their system as a way to funnel their money to another company that exists in another country with low or non-existent tax. There's definitely something fishy going on.
Much of the money ends up in the pockets of local politicians, judges and lawmakers, while another big chunk is needed to settle the constant parade of lawsuits.
Since it comes out of what the driver makes, the insurance Uber provides could be said that they aren't paying it. But the line item for ride insurance has gotten suspiciously high. They also have to give tons of refunds for their terrible logistics on Uber Eats. Food sits because the pay is bad or is a ridiculous distance. Customers complain because the food sat too long or never came. Restaurants get credits for food never picked up. After years there still is not a decent system to account for when restaurants close. They will just keep sending driver after driver. Drivers just cancel and move on to the next offer rather than call support because it takes too long and you only get $3. But if you're a responsible driver and you report those closures over and over legitimately, you'll get emails from Uber fraud accusing you of trying to game the system. For $3? Morons. Those software engineers haven't fixed squat in years.
I have been using Uber on all continents. And concluded not to invest in the company, whatever the CNBC crowd in its ignorance is professing. On local level everywhere, Uber is under siege from local competitors who copy their OS, and are far better in managing their drivers.
The biggest problem is Uber has so much unnecessary expenses. Every company is profitable, it’s how they use their money and by blowing their money on stupid shit that makes them unprofitable. Uber as a business model is a great idea I think , I just wish it was more profitable and again they would cut unnecessary expenses. Dara has made it worse I think, why worse.
from what i see from indonesia prespektif gojek in 2023 made loss maxim no report grab made profit in 2023 (same business like uber but we also have motor bikes they also have their own payment app)
@@LogicallyAnswered It's still far away but the threat of it it's still there. They don't want to be the next Kodak. Google is testing it right now in California.
