And because you can feel his "I need numbers dammit" pain.
From Musings on Markets, June 21:
Uber's bad week: Doomsday Scenario or Business Reset?
Uber just cannot seem to help itself, finding a way to get in the news, and often in ways that leave its image in tatters. You could see this pattern in full display last week, where Travis Kalanick, its founder and CEO took a leave of absence to reinvent himself as Travis 2.0, and David Bonderman, founding partner at TPG and Uber director, had to step down after making a sexist remark at a meeting with Uber employees about countering sexism. Today, Travis made his departure permanent, throwing the company into chaos as the board searches for a replacement. As someone who has been collecting stories almost obsessively about the company since June 2014, this is just the latest in a long string of news events, where Uber has been portrayed as a bad corporate citizen. As with prior episodes, there are many who are writing the company’s epitaph but I would not be in too much of a hurry. This is a company that built itself by breaking rules, and while I believe that the latest controversies will damage Uber, they will not disable it.
Uber: Retracing history
If you are just starting to pay attention to Uber, after the last week, let me start by bringing you up to date with the company. Founded in 2009, by Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp, in San Francisco as UberCab, and going into operation in 2010, the company has redefined the car service business, making the taxi cab a relic, at least for some segments of the population. Uber’s initial business model, which became the template for the ride sharing business, was a simple one. The company entered the car service business, and did so without buying any cars or hiring any drivers, essentially letting independent contractors use their own cars and operating as match-maker (with customers). That low capital intensity model has allowed the company to grow at an astronomical rate, with almost no large infrastructure or capital investments through much of its life.
HT: Alpha Ideas June 22 LinkfestMy first brush with Uber was in June 2014, when I tried to value the company. While many have since reminded me how wrong I was in my judgment, I have no qualms about repeating the story that I said about Uber at the time and the resulting valuation. Framing Uber as an urban, car-service company with local networking benefits and a low capital intensity model, I valued the company at about $6 billion. In fact, Bill Gurley, a partner at Benchmark Capital and an early investor in Uber, took me to task for the narrowness of my story, arguing that I was missing how much Uber would change the logistics market with his offerings.
Bill was right, I was wrong, and I did underestimate Uber’s growth potential, both in terms of geography and in attracting new users into the car service business. In October 2015, I revisited my Uber valuation and told a more expansive story of the company, incorporating its global reach and the influx of new users, while also noting that the pathway to profitability now faced far more roadblocks (as Didi Chuxing, Ola and GrabTaxi all found investors with open pockets and ramped up the competition). That resulted in a much higher revenue forecast, combined with more subdued operating margins, to yield a value of about $23 billion for the company.
In August 2016, I took another look at Uber, after it exited the Chinese market (the largest potential ridesharing market in the world) ceding the market to Didi Chuxing in return for Uber getting a 20% stake in Didi. I argued that this was a good development, since China had become a money pit for the company, sucking up more than a billion dollars in cash in the prior year. While there was some positive movement on some of my assumptions (slightly smaller losses and continued revenue growth), they were offset by some negative movement in other assumptions, leaving my value at about $28 billion, with almost all of the change in value from the prior year coming from the Didi stake that Uber got in exchange for leaving the China market. These are, of course, my stories about Uber and valuations and they matter little in how Uber is perceived by the market. In fact, there is clear evidence that notwithstanding all of the negativity around the company, investors have consistently pushed up its pricing from $ 60 million in 2011 to $3.5 billion in 2013 to $17 billion in June 2014 to almost $70 billion in the most recent capital round.
Uber: An Operations Update
The problem with Uber is that as a private business, albeit one with a high profile, its financial statements are not public. For much of its life, the only numbers that have been made public about the company have been leaked and my valuations have been based on this leaked information. Early this year, Uber finally departed from the script, partly with the intent of drawing attention away from negative stories about the company, and revealed selected financials for 2016. In particular, it reported that it generated more than $20 billion in gross billings in 2016, doubling its 2015 numbers, and that its share of these billings was $6.5 billion (which represents its net revenues). The latter number is puzzling since the company's stated share of the billings is only 20% (which would have meant only $4 billion in revenues) but part of the difference can be explained by the fact that Uber reported its gross billings from UberPool, its car pooling service, as revenues. The revenue growth has been dazzling but the losses continued to mount as well. Uber reported a loss of $2.8 billion for 2016, but that number would have been worse (closer to $3.8 billion) if losses in its defunct China operations had been counted. Overall, though, like all of its financial disclosures, leaked or otherwise, the number paint a mixed picture of Uber. On the plus side, they show a company growing explosively, adding cities, drivers and gross billings as it goes along. On the minus side, you are not seeing the rapid improvements in margins that you would expect to see as a company scales up, if it has economies of scale....MUCH MORE
