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Comment by disgruntledphd2 | Hacker News Reader

And yet they are still losing money. Odd, that.

Because of unrelated, ride-count-independent costs. For example, massively unprofitable self-driving car and food delivery businesses.

Those reasons have nothing to do with Uber being unable to charge more for the rides than the cost to provide, which is not true and a widely held misconception.

An investor should care about "can they make money selling rides". That business unit can always be broken off from orthogonal ventures.

Depends on who you think of as paying the costs. One of Uber's "innovations" is to get the key capex, cars, off their balance sheet. Along, of course, with major opex contributors like repairs. Instead, those burdens now fall on individual drivers. It's really not clear to me if Uber would be truly profitable if they had to pay a reasonable wage plus the actual costs.

So instead the question becomes how long they can keep exploiting workers like this. AB5 suggests that the answer is not "forever".

I've yet to hear a good argument for how they're exploiting workers. Tons of companies are always hiring yet people chose to work for Uber. Most people hate their job and wish they were paid more but Uber is the only company that will welcome you back with open arms if you don't show up for a month without notice.

I would suggest Google. There's a ton of discussion around California's AB5 that explains the issues.

I have many issues with Uber, but at least in the UK the argument that they’re pushing costs of fuel/repairs on to the drivers isn’t really a valid one. Most taxi drivers in the UK are self-employed, and pay a fee to one of the local cab companies in return for jobs getting pushed out to them, and they’re responsible for all the associated costs of running a taxi and remaining licensed to do so.

So who buys and repairs the cabs? In the US, it's mostly the cab companies. Drivers just have to pay a fixed night's rental, plus fuel. If,say, the transmission fails, the driver just swaps to a different cab; it's the cab company that's on the hook for the thousands in repairs.

Typically the driver does. I’m sure there are a few can firms running there own fleets and leasing them out, but in most cases it’s the driver who has responsibility for everything, right down to paying for the meter to be checked once a year.

Marketing costs in new markets have to be expenses immediately. This isn’t saying they are wildly profitable, just that some traditional metrics miss value in high growth companies.

growth tends to do that.

How long does a company need to grow for? They are 11 years old and there is arguably only 1 competitor.

Exactly.

Amazon was essentially break even for longer than that. Worked out ok there.

Amazon was building expensive infrastructure and improving their brand, whereas people are increasingly coming to associate Uber as tarnished (don't pay their drivers enough, don't screen for rapists, dumpster fire politics, killed a pedestrian testing their self-driving cars recklessly, continue to hemorrhage money after a decade of operations).

Amazon breaking even is very different from Uber lighting cash on fire to keep the lights on. Amazon was working towards something - becoming the best online shopping place possible (and building the logistical infrastructure to make that happen, allowing them to offer better services such as guaranteed fast shipping). Uber is just continually rearranging the chairs hoping to keep it going as long as they can.

There is nothing about Uber that scales without losing more money. If there were, they would have figured out how to make money by now. It's not like they haven't had enough time and money.

why Is the one outlier always used as an example? But even with that outlier it’s still not a great example. Amazon Retail is a low margin, low profit business. 75% of Amazon’s profit comes from AWS.

Unless you think that Uber is somehow going to pull a high margin non related business out some type of way, it’s really a horrible comparison.

Arguably one competitor if you just consider North America and exclude taxis or anything outside of their rideshare business.

And those competitors are also subsidizing rides. In many cases they are also paying drivers better to the point you'll get uber drivers recommending other services. The winner is whoever can pump more investor money in the longest, and even the can be disrupted by new rounds of investors.

They operate in so many markets though, many competitors in many markets. For example in Australia Ola is generally cheaper (especially so when there is Uber surge pricing). It probably isn't sustainable for Ola either, but at the same time, can Uber afford to give up those users, even in the short term?

But what sort of growth are they spending money on - and is what they're spending money on worth it? If you're spending money on free rides, you might be getting users that aren't going to be profitable long term. If you're spending that money on r&d moonshots like developing your own self driving cars, then it's not looking so good for you when tesla/waymo/etc are so much further ahead. And if economies of scale begin working against you, where as you get more and more drivers, they begin to organize and lobby and push to become classified as employees and raise your costs, then you might be facing a reconing very soon.

They're subsiding geographies that haven't yet reached critical mass for economy of scale to kick in. In mature markets they're profitable, so eventually when the other markets become mature for uber they'll also be profitable. The evidence is there. The money is put to good use. The only question mark is waymo/tesla/etc competition otherwise Uber would be a good bet.

I think another question for me is how much their "mature" markets have any real moat. Uber intentionally killed of most of their competition, hoping for monopoly rents. But rideshare strikes me as a very low barrier to entry.

Uber was certainly technologically innovative a decade ago. But a lot of the mobile and geo stuff is now off-the-shelf or as-a-service tech. Now that they're not subsidizing rides, even in this discussion we see people feeling the pinch. Uber's going to have to extract a lot of profit to reward investors and pursue growth. I think they're becoming vulnerable to low-cost competitors who just want to get by. E.g., driver co-ops and local specialty companies grabbing market niches.

So just like how Uber had to spend billions to subsidize markets to maturity, it's the same with any future competitor, low cost isn't a thing. Yet if Uber is already there the end market wouldn't look like how it currently is, it would be a mutually assured destruction with Uber where nobody wins. So spending billions to achieve nothing makes that possibility remote. Any competitor would have to bring disruptive technology.

It is not the same. I don't think there's a need to spend billions at all. The market exists. The technology exists. Drivers are already driving. I think it could be pretty easy to switch them to something that's a better deal for them.

The reason why Uber subsidies so much is because if there's not enough drivers people would need to wait a long time, or the price is very high and that creates a shitty experience that won't be able to compete. Conversely drivers don't have enough passengers. Initially, when you're just starting, that's just going to be a fact. Until you nurture the market to maturity the market doesn't exist. Don't look at what Uber has already built through years of huge spending and take it for granted.

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