Tech News
unicorn, huh? —
Trips were up 35%, revenue was up 14%, and that just makes it worse.
Jonathan M. Gitlin
– Aug 8, 2019 9: 35 pm UTC
Enlarge / Headquarters of ride-sharing technology company Uber in the South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood of San Francisco on October 13, 2017.
Uber lost more than $5 billion dollars in the second quarter of the year. This is the latest in a long series of bad quarters for the ride-hailing company, which also lost over a billion dollars during the first three months of this year. That brings 2019’s losses to over $6.2 billion, for those keeping score.
Despite losing so much money between April and June, Uber’s investor report is upbeat about an increase in bookings (up 31%), active users (up 30%), trips (up 35%), and revenue (up 14%). These figures do make one wonder if an uptick in business will just exacerbate the bleeding, however. There’s yet to be any real evidence that Uber’s business model will ever do anything other than burn investors’ money to make traffic worse.
Uber says that its cash and cash equivalents for Q2 were a healthy $13.7 billion, $8 billion of which came from its IPO in May.