Uber Shares Partial, Flattering Financial Data for 2016 with Bloomberg (Apr 14, 2017)
Uber’s financial results frequently leak through various online publications, and this year it seems to have decided to shortcut the process and speak directly to Bloomberg, which of course also gives it the opportunity to present the most flattering version of the numbers along with commentary. The highlights are that Uber grew revenues significantly year on year, but losses also grew. Uber emphasized that revenue growth outpaced growth in losses, but of course what you really want is for revenue growth to outpace cost growth, because that’s how you eventually become profitable, but that isn’t happening yet. Uber’s revenue growth was also helped by the different accounting treatment of UberPool rides (for which Uber records the full revenue as net revenue) versus other rides (for which it only reports its cut) which has the effect of making losses seem smaller in comparison to revenues, but is really just financial jiggery pokery. The headline financials shared with Bloomberg also exclude both the Chinese business, which was hugely loss-making for Uber, and various other items including car purchases (presumably as part of its autonomous technology testing operation). So these really are a pretty sanitized set of results, which nonetheless show significant and even growing losses.
via Bloomberg
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