I felt bad when I lost some change down the back of my couch this morning.
Uber has released its second quarterly earnings ever as a public company, and reported a loss of $5.2 billion in three months.
Yes, you’re reading that correctly. It says billion.
The latest losses were worse than analysts had expected and the company announced revenues that were also below predictions, sending share prices plunging by more than 10%.
Uber has never been profitable but has claimed that it can become so, but losses of that size in just a three-month period again raise questions about whether the company can ever be profitable.
But the company said that almost $4 billion of that amount is due to stock-based compensation that the company had to pay out as it went public.
So deducting the IPO-related cost, the company still lost $1.2 billion in three months.
Uber’s chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, told CNBC that 2019 would be “our peak investment year and we think that 2020, 2021, you’ll see losses come down”.
The company announced last month that it would be cutting 400 jobs from its marketing team as it aims to get costs under control.
