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from the that's-like-burning-two-$100-bills-AND-one-$20-bill-every-single-second dept.
Coronavirus clobbers Uber, leading to $1.8 billion quarterly loss:
The coronavirus pandemic hammered Uber's finances in the second quarter of 2020, the company announced on Thursday. Gross bookings for Uber's core ride-hailing business plunged by 75 percent compared with a year earlier—from $12.2 billion to $3 billion.
That was offset somewhat by rapid growth in Uber's delivery business. Delivery bookings more than doubled from $3.4 billion to $7 billion.
The company lost $1.8 billion in the second quarter on a GAAP basis. Ignoring one-time charges, Uber has been losing around $1 billion per quarter for the last couple of years.
[...] In May, Uber laid off 3,700 people in an effort to contain mounting losses.
Demand for rides cratered, while demand for deliveries soared. In his Thursday statement, Khosrowshahi argued that Uber's product portfolio had a "natural hedge" since people ordered more takeout even as they cut back on going out.
Still, Uber says that its rides business earned a $50 million profit on an EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) basis. The problem is that this figure is nowhere close to offsetting losses and overhead elsewhere—including the delivery business and Uber's expensive self-driving project.
Fortunately, Uber is in no danger of running out of money; it has almost $8 billion in cash and short-term investments. It could easily burn cash at this rate for another year.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday August 10 2020, @09:37PM (2 children)
And good riddance. Yellow cabbies (hell, all cabbies) were fucking worthless before ridesharing, in fact they were so fucking worthless it made me wonder if they were cover for a CIA or other globalist money-laundering operation using bulbheads to provide cover or smuggle arms or something.
All they had do to stay relevant was for their dispatchers to answer their fucking phones, and they couldn't even make that happen. But if you made one of the lucky 10% of calls that did get answered, they told you the cab would be there in 30 minutes. If you were one of the other lucky 10%, then a driver would show up 2 hours later (with cabbies it's either 2 hours late or not at all). And don't even get me started on the time I found a whole parking lot of them, ostensibly "on their shifts," shooting dice in a parking lot. All I needed was a 10 mile ride from one of them, and even that took Kissinger-tier levels of diplomacy to make happen.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday August 10 2020, @09:51PM
Taxi service is OK here in the Italian NE. Back in the day in Rome, there was a column of taxis patiently waiting for me and family to drag our cases towards their parking spot. They had seen us and made no effort to come get us. An empty cab passes by, asks us if we need a ride, we say yeah indeed, he starts to take us onboard and the first taxi of the queue moves towards us and starts screaming at the cab driver for stealing his clients. Needless to say we ignored the lazy ass taxi guy.
This and other episodes in Rome and Venice and Paris convinced me not to give tourist oriented big cities any more money than is necessary. You are just a number for them, because no matter how good they treat you, it's probably the last time you meet each other.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 10 2020, @10:58PM
FFS, EF, you're in SAN FUCKING DIEGO!! One of the lesser fiefdoms of Californication. Your experiences do not reflect life in the United States.