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In a prospectus for its upcoming public offering, Uber revealed intense competitive pressures exerted on its food distribution and food distribution businesses, telling potential investors that it would continue to spend a lot on to gain a share of the market.
The US car reservation company, a decade old, unveiled Thursday its filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, preparing for the most anticipated IPO of the year and to what should be one of the most important American technology directories ever.
The prospectus described a company that was spending considerable amounts of money to maintain its market share as the growth of its core businesses slowed down.
In total, the turnover reached $ 11.3 billion last year, said Uber, showing explosive progress for a company that reported only $ 495 million in 2014.
But in its oldest and most important activity, growth is slowed down. Revenue from this activity, with the exception of certain items such as some bonuses paid to drivers, peaked at $ 2.3 billion in the fourth quarter, which has hardly changed from the previous three months .
The new financial details show that competition remains fierce between competing car reservation applications, including Lyft in the United States and Ola in India, which are spending heavily to subsidize fares and recruit drivers.
Uber said it expects this momentum to continue, putting pressure on short-term margins to retain the majority of bookings in all regions where it operates.
"We will not fail to make short-term financial sacrifices that would bring us clear, long-term benefits," wrote Dara Khosrowshahi, Executive Director, in a letter included in the prospectus.
Uber recorded operating losses of $ 3.03 billion in 2018, excluding gains from the sale of businesses in Russia and Southeast Asia, which means the company lost $ 12 billion in total since 2014. Cash consumption decreased by $ 4.5 billion in 2016, but the company still bled $ 2.1 billion last year.
Uber is also investing in the creation of new businesses, including its Uber Eats food delivery unit, its freight trucking arm, and the rental of bicycles and scooters.
Eats has emerged as a positive point: revenues jumped from 103 million USD in 2016 to 1.46 billion USD in 2018, accounting for 13% of Uber's total revenue. But as with the rides, Eats' sales growth slowed in the past year, as Uber struggled to gain market share.
The company aims to raise $ 10 billion from its IPO and recently announced to some of its investors that it could reach $ 90 billion to $ 100 billion, according to sources close to the record. The company was last valued at US $ 76 billion at a private fundraiser in August.
Thursday's deposit did not contain details of the bid amount or the expected price of the shares, including only the amount of user space used to calculate sales charges. But this revealed that the IPO would include the shares offered by the company and certain existing shareholders. He did not specify which shareholders planned to sell.
The company plans to launch its investor roadshow on April 29 and register its shares on the New York Stock Exchange on May 10, according to informed project people. The IPO is led by Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.
Like its rival Lyft, listed last month, Uber has also included a program to offer shares to drivers. Uber said it would pay $ 300 million in bonuses to about 1.1 million drivers having made at least 2,500 trips to the company. These drivers will have the opportunity to buy shares at the price of the IPO.
Mr. Khosrowshahi's letter addressed some of the governance and cultural issues that have harmed society and led to the ouster of Uber founder, Travis Kalanick, from the position of General Manager in 2017. .
Mr. Khosrowshahi said that becoming a public company meant baduming "even greater responsibilities" while Uber pursued a mission that he described as "putting the world in motion."
"Some of the attributes that made Uber an extremely successful young company – a keen sense of entrepreneurship, our willingness to take risks that others could not, and the famous Uber hustle – led to tracking errors, "Khosrowshahi said. . "In fact, when I joined Uber as CEO, many people asked me why I would leave the stability of my previous job for a position that would be anything but.
"My answer was simple: Uber is a company that's only a generation old, and the opportunities that it offers are huge."
In his own letter, Ronald Sugar, chairman of Uber's board, praised the company's one-by-one voting structure, a departure for tech start-ups, who typically use a two-man structure. clbades that gives founders and early investors votes per share.
"World-clbad governance will be our star of the north," he wrote.
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