Uber Continues its String of Massive Losses in Q3 2019

Despite Uber’s claims that 2019 will be its peak investment year, and the company’s losses will see a massive decline, it has still reported steep losses for the quarter. However, overall revenue growth looks promising.

The ride-hailing company reported a net loss of $1.2 billion for the third quarter of 2019, ending on 30^th September. Even though the company faced a massive loss, it is not as bad as the $5.2 million loss faced by Uber in the same quarter last year.

According to the report, Uber brought in a total of $3.8 billion in revenue with $16.5 billion in customer payments (before deducting the driver’s payments and discounts). The company’s EBITDA loss was $631 million, $24 million lower than Q2 2019.

Moving on to UberEats, the subsidiary saw a 73 percent annual increase in sales and an 8 percent sequential sales increase. However, it still did not meet the expected results. UberEats managed a revenue of $3.66 billion, lower than the expected $3.85 billion.

Apart from this, its annual ride-sharing bookings grew by 20 percent to $12.55 billion approximately $2.3 billion higher than the comparable quarter last year.

Based on the above-mentioned statistics, the company expects an adjusted EBITDA loss of between $2.8 billion and $2.9 billion as compared to the previously expected adjusted loss of $3.2 billion.

Since going public in May this year, Uber is having a hard time winning over its investors. Due to the company’s slow growth and steep losses, it has faced massive pressure to boost its finances.

Since its IPO, Uber has gone through two rounds of lay-offs with the most recent round in September that impacted 435 members of the engineering and product teams.

Uber’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, while talking with CNN, said,

This company grew very fast — and in the early years, the most important factor was speed to market. There wasn’t a lot of focus on ‘how do you make sure you work efficiently? Our priorities are changing.  Seeing more predictability around our rides business, although there are competitive flare-ups. The teams are just executing better. Competition is a way of life, where our margins are headed in that environment.