Dara, the Tim Cook of Uber

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Emailed on April 12th, 2019 in The Friday Forward

Uber yesterday filed its highly-anticipated IPO registration. You can find it here, and also check out Axios' breakdown of the key numbers.

A couple key points according to Axios' Dan Primack:

  1. Uber was profitable in 2018. Mostly caused by divestitures of ride-hail businesses in both Southeast Asia (to Grab) and Russia (to a joint venture with Yandex). Don't expect this to be true for 2019.

  2. The losses are huge but shrinking. Operating income loss down from $4 billion to $3 billion in 2018, while adjusted EBITDA loss down from $2.6 billion to $1.8 billion.

  3. Revenue growth is slowing, from 106% between 2016 and 2017 to 42% between 2017 to 2018 (finishing up at $11.27 billion). Most of that slowdown is in ride-hail, reflecting greater competition, mature market saturation, increased rider discounts and the aforementioned divestitures. Revenue growth for Uber Eats also slowed, but that was because the big ramp occurred in 2017. It shows GAAP revenue of $103 million (2016), $587 million (2017) and $1.46 billion (2018).

Uber filed to raise $1 billion, but that is said to be a placeholder for actual plans to raise $10 billion. That latter number would be the eighth-largest U.S. IPO of all time.

It plans to seek an initial market valuation of between $90 billion and $100 billion.

Sean Steigerwald