Uber lays off 3,000 people in second big round of cuts:
Uber is laying off another 3,000 workers, the company announced in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. That's in addition to the 3,700 workers the company laid off earlier this month. Uber had 26,900 employees at the end of last year. Uber drivers, whom the company treats as independent contractors, are not directly affected.
"Given the dramatic impact of the pandemic, and the unpredictable nature of any eventual recovery, we are concentrating our efforts on our core mobility and delivery platforms and resizing our company to match the realities of our business," CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in the SEC filing. "That's led us to some painful decisions today."
Uber's core ride-hailing business has been devastated by the coronavirus pandemic. The Wall Street Journal reports that Uber's rides business was down 80 percent, year over year, in April.
[...] Uber estimates that it will spend $110 million to $140 million on severance packages and another $65 million to $80 million on expenses related to shutting down offices. The Wall Street Journal says Uber is closing 45 office locations. The two rounds of cuts are designed to reduce Uber's overhead by more than $1 billion.
(Score: 2) by gringer on Friday May 22 2020, @10:49AM (3 children)
"Uber demonstrates once again how bad their financial situation was prior to COVID-19 becoming a good excuse for dropping staff"
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2020, @10:53AM
Corona Changed EVERyTHing, Give Us Money
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Friday May 22 2020, @10:58AM (1 child)
Did Uber ever make money? I know they had a lot of cash flow, with investors continuously trying to get onboard. But, did they ever make a profit? Doesn't seem that way to me.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2020, @11:32AM
https://www.google.com/search?q=Did+Uber+ever+make+money [google.com]
About 351,000,000 results (0.58 seconds)
This hit from last summer may be fairly unbiased(??) but requires interpreting the business-school jargon, https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/uber-profitability/ [upenn.edu]
For example:
Why do I have this feeling that "consolidate operations" really means, "restore monopolistic behavior"?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2020, @11:25AM (4 children)
26,900 to write an app and host a web presence?
Crikey!
Or that includes the 25,000 lawyers and lobbyists to ensure they've bribed the appropriate people to operate legally?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2020, @11:37AM (1 child)
You forgot about the "sure thing" of self-driving cars, that effort has burned through an enormous amount of money and so far they have at least one pedestrian death on their hands.
From what I can see, it may be relatively easy to demonstrate autonomous driving (and raise investor expectations), but incredibly hard to deliver autonomous driving that works outside a small test area.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2020, @01:59PM
More Chinese grad students required. That'll solve it any day now. Don't think, just keep fiddling with the settings.
(Score: 4, Touché) by MostCynical on Friday May 22 2020, @11:39AM (1 child)
you do have to wonder what 26,900 people are doing.
As a comparison, TSMC has about 48,000 employees [wikipedia.org]; but they actually make stuff
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday May 22 2020, @02:42PM
At the rate they burn money, someone's got to keep those fires going.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by Username on Friday May 22 2020, @01:54PM (2 children)
What was that CA law that put a bunch of "news" sites out of business? Probably all those layoffs were in CA for a similar reason.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Friday May 22 2020, @05:27PM
I have no effing idea! Seems like it's your job to tell us.
But hey, it blames CA so it must be insightful, right?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2020, @02:26PM
I think it was called the "golden rule": You run out of gold, you all get the fuck out.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Friday May 22 2020, @06:04PM (1 child)
This is the point where the organization's leadership grabs as much of the money as possible and heads for the hills.
Despite their marketing about "disrupting the marketplace" and such, when you look at what Uber's actual business was, it amounted to "an often-questionable car service with a phone app". That's it. To the extent that it offered any value different than a cab company, it was that it was dodging government regulations on car services and cab companies, but those were legal technicalities that were sooner or later not going to continue to work.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2020, @02:23PM
But before they came, taxi service in the US (non NYC) was miserable and sclerotized between the incumbent cab companies and their regulators.