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The year of The IPO continues as Uber on Thursday released its first official document with the Securities and Exchange Commission – a sign that the tech company is preparing to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange . The depot shows a sprawling transport business with operations spanning 63 countries and more than 700 cities, providing 5.2 billion trips in 2018, or about one per capita in Europe and Asia.
Uber generated revenue of $ 11.3 billion in 2018, a 42% jump from the previous year. And while its operating losses are still heavy – $ 3 billion in 2018 – the company has managed to stem them at least a little, bringing operating losses down to $ 4.1 billion. 2017. Uber had 91 million active users by the end of 2018, 23 million more than a year earlier. Revenue growth, however, halved in 2018. This is partly due to the growing power of Lyft, which now captures users faster than its biggest rival, but also to the tightening of competition in the distribution of meals, where the great success of Uber, Mange, does not develop as quickly.
Nevertheless, the company is expected to go public with a valuation of $ 90 billion to $ 100 billion, making it the largest US technology company to go public in the last five years. (Facebook became public in 2012 with a valuation of 104 billion dollars.)
Uber is tower-hail; Uber is e-scooters and e-bikes; Uber is a thriving delivery company. Uber is a trucking and logistics software; Uber wants to build a fully functional autonomous car. And Uber only wants to become bigger: "Today, Uber account for less than 1% of all kilometers traveled in the world," wrote the Director General, Dara Khosrowshahi, in a letter attached to the file. "Because our work is not yet finished at 1%, we will work with a look forward to the future."
But the depot also portrays a company that is struggling to recover from its chaotic past. The company said it lost "hundreds of thousands" of customers in early 2017, when its drivers continued to operate at airports during protests against immigration restrictions imposed by Trump's administration. to visitors from Muslim countries. this led to the #DeleteUber campaign. The filing note is raging from a host of critics from accusations of sexual harassment, discrimination and a then toxic business culture. It refers, obliquely, to investigations of its tool Greyball, a software that tried to circumvent the regulation in cities that did not want the company operates on its roads. These events provoked, if not presumed, today's technological boost. And from a business point of view, the company explained that because of its history, it was harder for Uber to retain its users, stay on the side of important municipal and federal regulators, and keep it up to date. avoid writing very large checks to lawyers, who represent Uber in legal proceedings. and surveys around the world.
Now that she is preparing to go public, Uber faces critical questions. What happens if the company fails to achieve profitability … ever? Uber thinks it will be necessary to invest to find new users, whether it's bikers, drivers, restaurants or shippers, and use incentives, discounts and promotions to do it. (More than $ 3 billion, or more than a third of total operating costs, were spent on sales and marketing last year.) New capital will need to be invested in new markets and new ones will be required. operations. It will continue to find new employees and drivers. He will write checks for expensive "flying taxi" searches and autonomous vehicles en route. (The company acknowledges in the filing that it expects a competitor such as Waymo, General Motors / Cruise, Tesla, Apple or Zoox to "develop these technologies before us.")
"Many of our efforts to generate revenue are new and unproven, and any inability to adequately increase revenues or contain associated costs could prevent us from achieving or increasing our profitability," writes the company in its ranking.
What happens if regulators decide that Uber drivers are no longer independent contractors, but employees entitled to benefits and increased supervision? Today, Uber faces disputes and protests from drivers challenging its fundamental business model around the world. The filing notes that more than 60,000 drivers have entered into (or expressed an interest in committing) an arbitration over a misclassification of employees, which the company writes "could result in significant costs to us". in the years to come.
Updated 4/11/19 at 21:35 EST: This story has been updated to correct the annual growth in the number of Uber monthly asset users.
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