Now there are drivers who bought their cars and have car loans to pay. But Uber stopped the incentive spigot and suddenly drivers are earning half of what they were making earlier.
Most drivers I speak to here are struggling to pay off their car loans. Some have resorted to sleeping in their cars and driving 12-18 hours a day just to make ends meet (not ideal for drivers or passengers).
The moment someone comes in with even a remotely better offer, most of them will jump ship.
https://qz.com/908802/uber-and-ola-drivers-in-india-are-now-...
I guess what I'm getting at is that a company valued at 69 billion dollars going out of business in less than 2 years should be a surprise to everyone.
The answer might be yes and I'd go with yes, but if they're for some reason on what they see as a death spiral, they could return some investor money and call it quits.
60+ billions valuation for a company losing over 2 billions a year or one third of their total revenue, seems like a big pile of horse manure.
Uber could be valued at a gazillion $, but if it can't make payroll in 90 days, it's got a problem that would be tough to fix, given the apparent lack of a profitable business model.
revenue $6.5 billion
losses excluding China $2.8 bn
$7 billion of cash on hand, along with an untapped $2.3 billion credit facility (bloomberg)
So they are not going bust tomorrow but whether they can build a real business from that is quite questionable.
Revenue is growing but losses are growing too, so revenue is not growing fast enough.
7 billions of cash means Uber will be broke in less than two years depending how much faster losses are growing compared to revenue.
Investors might become hesitant until they know where the lawsuit with google is going.
My interpretation is that, unless Uber finds a way to reverse steam and become profitable they are still around today but are on the way out and might be gone tomorrow.
UberEats for example is completely dying a death in London (this may be different for other markets). Speaking to a few restaurant chain owners they get virtually no orders through and the experience is terrible, because drivers get lost and the food gets cold. They then blame the restaurant and leave loads of bad reviews everywhere.
I genuinely think Uber has very limited network effects. The driver fleet can drive for other companies at the same time, the user will just use the app that is cheapest/works the best/has the best service. I don't see enormous stickiness there, and the other services they offer don't work well IMO.
nb. why on earth is ubereats a seperate app, for example? It should be in the same app.
Ever heard of bubbles ? Well they inflate until they burst in a poof where a few trillions disappear.
Remember the dot com bubble bursting at the beginning of the 2000's ? Expect something similar in a not so distant future as the bubble cycle repeats itself.
So yes a 69 billion dollars market valuation for a company does not mean anything other than investors made a bet this company would somehow pay them back their money plus extra at some point.
Reddit was much smaller than Digg for years: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2005-06-01%202... . Reddit was definitely "the little engine that could" for about 6 years, but it was really in 2010 when Digg imploded with the self-inflicted wounds of Digg v4 when Reddit really took off.
In other words, MySpace losing to Facebook seemed largely because Facebook just had a better product (cleaner, focused on real identities), while Digg, like Uber, largely was the victim of self-inflicted wounds.
Sorry, I know flickr sucks but it seems ncomment original website is now gone, the comics survived on flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/25036088@N06/sets/721576159246...
Edit: the innovation of the News Feed can't be overstated. IIRC, MySpace had nothing like it and it's hard to remember Facebook before it.
Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace for quite a sum as an attempt to get into the online business because all their attempts failed miserably for a lack of understanding and vision. The same drove myspace to its expected outcome.
If it's competition you're concerned about: they have a well documented record of sabotaging their competition, rather than winning on merits. They're not good for the market they are in, which is bad for all of us.
There are also some other reasons we want them to die, relating to their being an abusive employer, which I'd like to think would have consequences for their reputation in our community.
In fact, Google's Java lawsuit with Sun/Oracle seemed worse for Google to me, as Google empployees openly discussed in emails that they were violating licensing terms and still did it.
I think it's abundantly clear at this point that both Lyft and Uber use monopolistic anti competitive tactics.