2018 revenue of $2.16B, with a loss of $911.3M. Oof. Though as a passenger I can't say I mind buying $2 bills for $1!
I want to see Lyft succeed just to counter Uber, but yeah, those numbers need to be healthier
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-results/uber-posts-5...
People have mistakenly accused both Uber and Amazon of doing the former when they were doing the latter.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-14/uber-reve...
* As a percentage of revenue, cost of revenue decreased from 62% to 58%.
* As a percentage of revenue, sales and marketing expenses decreased from 54% to 37%.
These seem to be positive signs.
We are living in a time of "eventual profitability" where some companies have immense privilege to lose an immense amount of money, are encouraged to lose it to build a large company in hopes of creating a sustainable model.
Right now there's not even profitability on the horizon. Losses increase with more revenues which is horrible. All we saw was a negative 2nd derivative of cash loss but there's no telling whether the delta will be fast enough to produce an actually profitable company.
Go through their financial statements. They were barely profitable on a GAAP basis for a long time. Barely profitable is entirely different from massively bleeding money. Barely profitable means they were making profits but reinvested them into their business.
The stories are entirely different.
Their stories are not entirely different, they are extraordinarily similar. Both nascent markets, both money losers at IPO, both needed cash to continue their growth story.
Do you understand the purpose of an IPO? It's a funding round. If you have a ton of cash on hand, or your profitable but don't have a growth area that requires large capital, there's literally no reason to go public.
That's why Lyft is going public now and nobody is talking about Airbnb. The former needs cash to continue it's massive growth in new markets, the latter is a profitable company with low capex that doesn't need a funding round.
Cost of revenue primarily consists of insurance costs that are generally required under TNC and city regulations for ridesharing and bike and scooter rentals, respectively, payment processing charges, including merchant fees and chargebacks, hosting and platform-related technology costs, amortization of technology related intangible assets, certain direct costs related to bikes, scooters and the Select Express Drive Partner program, and personnel-related compensation costs.
FTFY