SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Uber lost another $1.1 billion in the third quarter of 2019, the company announced on Monday. This wasn't a surprise: Uber lost about the same amount in the first quarter of 2019 and lost even more last quarter.
Yet the company argues that things aren't as bad as that headline figure suggests. To show why, Uber broke its earnings down by business area, distinguishing its core "rides" app from Uber Eats, Uber Freight, and other operations.
Uber says that, if you exclude certain non-operating expenses—mainly interest, depreciation, and stock-based compensation—the "rides" app actually earned a substantial $631 million profit. That's enough to cover the company's core operating expenses, the company said. But Uber's profitability was dragged down by losses in its other businesses—mainly a $316 million loss from Uber Eats.
Of course, interest, depreciation, and stock-based compensation are real costs. So the fact that Uber looks less unprofitable excluding them isn't going to be particularly reassuring to Uber investors.
But the reason these numbers could ultimately be good news for investors is that they suggest Uber's core rides business might not be perpetually money-losing. If the "EBIDTA" profitability of the ride-hailing business continues to improve—it grew from $416 million in the year-ago quarter to $631 million last quarter on an EBITDA basis—the company could eventually reach honest-to-goodness profitability.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday November 10 2019, @04:29AM (3 children)
As hemocyanin points out, not all cities run their taxi services the same way. I suspect that Chicago is probably as corrupt as New York (Chicago, the most corrupt city in the US, allowing New York to out-corrupt them?) But, smaller cities and towns can't compete with the Big Apple.
We had a taxi service locally, for awhile. It didn't do so well because small town and rural economics just don't support a taxi service. If there was corruption involved, it was probably on tax returns.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday November 10 2019, @10:31PM (2 children)
Where I live the taxi industry was deregulated in the 1980's.
Instantly every idiot with a car became a taxi driver and there was chaos for a while.
Once the police made it clear that if your taxi broke down before it got you where you wanted to go, you didn't have to pay (this only happened to me one time) things began to improve.
The really dodgy operators went away after a while, and the taxi industry is reasonably good now.
Uber still manages to undercut taxis on price, and by quite a lot in some cases, so I don't know who is losing money but someone is. Hopefully it's Softbank and the other Uber shareholders.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheReaperD on Tuesday November 12 2019, @11:24AM (1 child)
Good to hear that your city tried to fix the taxi system. Unfortunately, they decided, as many do, that the solution to bad regulation was deregulation rather than reform, thus leading to chaos. Though it seems they learned from their mistakes and put some regulation back in place that made sense. Good for them (and you). Hopefully, their learn from the mistakes of the past when they finally get around to dealing with Uber.
Almost always, deregulation is not the solution to bad government. Deregulation ends up with chaos, raised prices, corruption and greed in most cases (though not always right away; giving the false impression that it can be good for the economy). Bad government needs to be reformed (and in extreme cases, such as fascist governments and oligarchies, shot), not deregulated.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday November 12 2019, @08:32PM
That is almost entirely true.
There is now a fair bit of regulation on the taxi industry (but not Uber, for some reason) as deregulation did not produce high prices and corruption, but unsustainably low prices and really, really poor service as the barriers to entry were reduced to almost zero.