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posted by janrinok on Saturday August 10 2019, @11:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the chilly-drive dept.

Uber is freezing hiring for software engineers and product managers across its US and Canadian workforce, the company acknowledged to Bloomberg on Friday. The shift was reported by Yahoo earlier in the day. The freeze does not apply to Uber's autonomous vehicle and freight shipping divisions.

The news comes a day after Uber reported second quarter operating losses of $5.4 billion—a new record for the company. That figure exaggerates Uber's quarterly burn rate because it includes more than $4 billion in one-time charges related to Uber's initial public offering. Still, excluding IPO-related charges still leaves around $1.2 billion in operating losses, worse than the $1 billion the firm lost in the first quarter.

Uber recently laid off 400 marketing workers. According to Yahoo, Uber employees are worried that this could be a prelude to broader cuts as the company's struggles to stem its losses.


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  • (Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Sunday August 11 2019, @05:57AM (3 children)

    by Pslytely Psycho (1218) on Sunday August 11 2019, @05:57AM (#878719)

    Seriously. Both Uber and Lyft lose fucking billions every year(OK, Lyft is only around a billion a year, while Uber has recently been about a billion a quarter, and then five...fuck, together these guys lost more than DJT claims he's worth!) and stay in business with multi-billion valuations?
    Did they take over drug running from El Chapo and keep a secret set of books?
    And with both going public, how in this strange dimension of upside down economics would they ever be considered a good investment?

    Hey, popcorn stocks are up!
    https://markets.financialcontent.com/stocks/quote?Symbol=NY%3ACAG [financialcontent.com]

    At least their valuation is based on making a profit every year.....

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @07:47AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @07:47AM (#878754)

    Why don't you check if your 401K has any money invested in it? Governments push everyone to have retirement accounts but unlesss you're vigilant that just aggregates a nice big pot for some investment manager to lose while collecting a nice commission.
    That $5Billion Uber just lost came from somewhere, and I bet it won't be out of the pockets of the 0.1% that control the people that 'manage' your pension funds.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Sunday August 11 2019, @10:14AM (1 child)

    by TheRaven (270) on Sunday August 11 2019, @10:14AM (#878811) Journal

    Around the height of the dot-com boom, the joke was that Amazon lost money on each sale and made up for it in volume. There was some truth behind this: they did lose money on each sale, but doing so let them get enough market share that they were eventually able to bring their costs down and make it profitable at that price. I suspect that a lot of investors are expecting Uber / Lyft to do the same thing. The problem is that there were a lot of inefficiencies in the markets that Amazon was competing in (and Bezos was willing to accept razor-thin margins), whereas that isn't nearly as true for taxi companies. Their biggest costs are labour and fuel. Uber may be able to cut fuel costs by going all electric (there's an airport taxi company here that's moved to using Teslas for their entire fleet and is able to slightly undercut their competitors as a result - though that's largely possible because the fleets for airport taxi companies are already at the high end so the cost difference between a Tesla and their competitors' cars isn't so huge). They may be able to eliminate the drivers with self-driving cars.

    The bet for Uber is that, once self-driving electric cars drop the costs of operating a taxi fleet to a fraction of its current value, they will have the customer lock-in and the scale of supported markets so that it will be easier to plug in a fleet of Uber or Lyft self-driving electric taxies in a given city and see high utilisation than it will be to do the same with an independent fleet. The problem is that their value is solely in the user interface: go to a new city, use the same app to book a taxi. If someone comes up with a federated mechanism for doing the same thing, there goes Uber's margin. Amazon could do this quite easily: they already sell other things for third-party sellers and take a tiny cut, they could easily offer a unified payment mechanism to any legally registered taxi company and remove Uber's advantage entirely.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @01:50PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @01:50PM (#878840)

      Bezos has been losing money for like 20 years. Someone kept him going. Only cloud has started to make operations profitable in the last years.