Yves Smith in New York Magazine: Will Uber Survive the Next Decade?
But, but, but — you may say — Uber has established a large business in cities over the world. Yes, it’s easy to get a lot of traffic by selling at a discount. Uber is subsidizing ride costs. Across all its businesses, Uber was providing services at only roughly 74 percent of their cost in its last quarter. Uber was selling its services at only roughly 64 percent of their cost in 2017, with a GAAP profit margin of negative 57 percent. […]
Well, sure, negative 26 percent profit margin seems bad, but you just make it up on volume.
Uber defenders might argue that that’s a big improvement from 2015, when revenues only covered 43 percent of costs, and the GAAP margin was negative 132 percent. But as we’ll discuss in more detail, this reduction in how much Uber spends to get each average dollar of revenue didn’t come from improved efficiency, but was due to almost entirely to cutting driver pay. The transportation company appears to have hit the limit of how much it can squeeze drivers, since churn has increased. […]
Just wait until you see how little these companies plan to pay their autonomous cars!
The only advantage Uber might have achieved is taking advantage of its drivers’ lack of financial acumen — that they don’t understand the full cost of using their cars and thus are giving Uber a bargain. There’s some evidence to support that notion. Ridester recently published the results of the first study to use actual Uber driver earnings, validated by screenshots. Using conservative estimates for vehicle costs, they found that that UberX drivers, which represent the bulk of its workforce, earn less than $10 an hour. They would do better at McDonald’s. But even this offset to the generally higher costs of fleet operation hasn’t had a meaningful impact on Uber’s economics.
For someone like me who only knows Uber as the multi-billion dollar juggernaut, this was an interesting read.