Uber just reported its second quarterly earnings ever as a public company, and hoo boy! That’s a lot of red ink! The ride-hailing giant reported losing a whopping $5.2 billion in the last three months. No, there isn’t dirt on your screen. That’s billion with a “b.”
Lyft, which reported its earnings on Wednesday, fared better but still posted a loss of $644 million during the quarter. The numbers for both companies look a lot better when adjusted for things like amortization of intangible assets and stock-based compensation for employees post-IPO. Excluding you exclude one-time stock-based compensation payments of $3.9 billion, Uber lost $1.3 billion. Tweaking those numbers more, like adjusting for so-called EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization), and Uber lost $656 million, while Lyft lost $197 million.
But analysts on Wall Street expected these losses, and so we’re supposed to shrug and say “no big whoop.” “It’s a routine cost for newly public companies—though Uber’s is much larger due to the company’s size—and investors are likely to forgive it as a one-off,” writes Eric Newcomer in Bloomberg.
Indeed, Uber’s stock price was up most of the day on Thursday, thanks to Lyft’s expectation-beating earnings report: $867 million in revenue, up 72 percent from the year before. (Analysts had expected 60 percent revenue growth.) Uber’s revenue is also growing, but at a slower rate than Lyft — $3.1 billion for the quarter, up 14 percent from last year.
But I’m not a Wall Street analyst, and neither are you (probably), so all of this can feel a little abstract. Losing $5.2 billion in a single quarter seems… bad, right? Like lose-your-job, never-work-in-this-town-again kind of bad. It’s certainly Uber’s largest ever reported loss. The company’s CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, is chalking it up to 2019 being a “peak investment year,” thanks to the IPO.