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Comment by notTyler | Hacker News Reader

I've always wondered if uber were to abandon their ongoing development efforts and focus on support and maintenance, would they would actually be profitable? It seems to me they would need a fraction of the tech workers they currently support.

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No. Their quarterly losses are more than double their entire R&D spend.

Fact check: R&D spend for three months ending June 2019 was $3.06B. Reported loss for three months ending June 2019 was $5.24B. So, already false.

Now take away the one-time IPO expense of $3.9B, and we're not even close to being true. Further take away the $300M "IPO driver appreciation award" and you end up with a $1B loss for three months ending June 2019. In other words, the quarterly R&D spend is over three times the size of the quarterly loss.

https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det...

But that IPO stock-comp expense is largely attributable to R&D, so if you want to subtract that from the losses to look at a more cash-focused analysis you have to substract that cost from the R&D side as well.

Of the $3.95B total stock expense, $2.56B was from R&D, which suggests cash cost that quarter was more like $910m (still a lot!)

To my mind this quarter shouldn't be used at all in this kind of discussion since its so messy. e.g.: I take your point, but that $2.56B is the culmination of over ten years of R&D compensation. It's not at all representative of the company's broader financials.

OP's inference that Uber's quarterly loss is more than double Uber's quarterly R&D costs in general shouldn't be propped up by a moment in time observation.

Based on year 2018 numbers, Uber needs to grow their revenue by 9.3%, and reduce their expenses by 6% to book a 0.1B profit. Assuming an average employee expense of 230k per year, Uber letting go 435 puts them 6.66% on the way to profitable expense reduction.

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