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Comment by dawhizkid | Hacker News Reader

Honestly between $UBER and $LYFT I have no idea why you'd own $LYFT.

$LYFT has all their eggs in one basket. It's a pure bet on US rideshare, which has been plateauing for quite some time.

$UBER has a global presence, and although lost in Asia owns a substantial share of Didi (#1 in China) and Grab (#1 in South East Asia), and now bought Careem (#1 in Middle East), and is still dominant in South America. It also has Uber Eats, which has grown to a multi-billion co on it's own.

It's also much further along on proprietary self-driving tech than Lyft is.

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I used to think that, but you really can go both ways. I think a lot of investors like Lyft because it's small relative to Uber and its primary footprint is America. Which means more opportunity to grow in a future international expansion, and you can make the argument that they're behaving like a smart franchise -- perfecting operations in America first before they do a worldwide expansion with even more variables.

That being said, Lyft is losing a lot of money and they can't really increase prices too much or customers will bail and go to Uber. And they're both giving away tons of discounts to riders in the run-up to the IPOs, which doesn't seem like a great sign to me, because they are already fairly discounted from a taxi which is usually a sustainable business model that is not dependent on external funding.

Two things I find interesting about the Lyft story:

1) In their prospectus they claim that 44% of all rides start/end in low-income areas. [a]

2) One of the key arguments they make in their fight against recent NYC regulations to raise the minimum pay for drivers is that raising prices directly leads to a fall in revenue (demand). [b]

So a large % of their users are price-sensitive, but raising prices cuts demand. A difficult path forward for reaching profitability indeed.

[a] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1759509/000119312519...

[b] https://blog.lyft.com/posts/2019/3/16/tlc-rules-impact-on-ly...

> Honestly between $UBER and $LYFT I have no idea why you'd own $LYFT.

You use $UBER as if it is a publically listed stock - it isn't. $UBER doesn't exist.

Uber (btw: did the all-caps and dollar sign add to the readability of your post?) is also much more expensive than Lyft is. At some point, you have to decide how much more you want to pay for a company to chase down inherently less-lucrative markets.

I think that Uber's self-driving technology is worth negative dollars.

> did the all-caps and dollar sign add to the readability of your post?

This is a standard way to denote stock symbols.

Uber doesn't have one though, seeing as how they aren't publicly listed

I would prefer Lyft purely because I consider Uber to be a deeply unethical company.

Is Lyft _actually_ any better other than paying a token more attention to PR? It's not like they actually employee their drivers.

I am not aware of Lyft intentionally breaking laws, spying on city officials responsible for enforcing those laws, and lying about and hiding their nefarious behavior. Uber has done all of those things.

No. No it’s not. They just rode Uber’s tailwind and let them take the punches.

You can make the argument either way. On one hand, Lyft has its eggs in one basket. On the other, Lyft is concentrating on one market and can focus on it a lot more clearly than Uber can.

I agree about Uber Eats, though. That feels like a genuine differentiator. But I'll bet that when Uber IPOs it'll command a price far higher than Lyft's, so it'll be factored in.

Lyft doesn't have just one basket. Their supposed growth area is bicycles and scooters, a money-losing industry in which they will be the Nth entrant for a large value of N. They also have a self-driving-car effort that is dead last.

Lyft is also in Canada.

Although no official plans to expand, Lyft can benefit from having Uber work out the kinks and then become a second provider.

If someone is bullish on the rideshare market then why not invest in both?

Or lyft is focused, and uber is spreading itself too thin. (I am not invested with either)

Being "focused" on a plateauing market doesn't do much

Not necessarily.

Theres lots of plateaued markets that can still give smaller competitors room for massive growth.

Examples?

Most industries, certainly in the west. Possibly even most 'tech' ones. I doubt mobile (phone infrastructure) is expanding that much, neither probably are smart phones. Landline internet is well past its growth phase. Big iron computing, desktop PCs.

Industries can't keep expanding forever. Sooner or later they have to mature. A growth industry might be a nice sound bite for a marketing pitch, but I'd rather be in an already large market, than a might be big one day market.

get both. The main argument of the naysayers is they switch back and forth depending on price... its like people who complain the food sucks, while over eating it.

The bear argument is far simpler: most people consume rideshare services in a single locality. Barriers to entry are close to nil. So there is no moat anywhere and limited profitability.

Why would anyone invest in Uber? Their growth is skowing down, revenue per ride is dropping. And they’ve had a net loss of something like s billion a year for the past few years.

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