Uber stopped telling investors how much it pays to drivers – Quartz

More interesting than what Uber shared in his last quarterly report was what he had left out.

In the second quarter of 2018, which ended on June 30, Uber released earnings figures for drivers, disclosing them in a "cash flow" section of its income statement. They were interesting! The drivers divided by the company pay in two categories: "net income of partners" and "incentives for partners and various payments. "(" Partner "is Uber's preferred way of referring to independent contractors who work as drivers.)

Driver reports in Uber's reports have shown why "portering" is so unprofitable – and why the company would like to switch to a driverless model: in the second quarter of 2018, 72% of gross bookings were destined to drivers. In other words, the vast majority of sales or "gross bookings" generated by Uber are not retained by the company. For Uber, one of the solutions to become profitable is to reduce the share of bookings transferred to drivers, which was the case of about 4 percentage points from January 2017 to June 2018.

You can see why these line items next to the recipes were telling. But in the third quarter of 2018, ended September 30, Uber removed its section on counterparty products and services, including a breakdown of driver earnings and incentives. In other words: Uber has stopped telling investors how much it pays to drivers.

At the time, Uber had stated that it had changed its reporting in the third quarter, in particular by eliminating the revenue items as revenue, as it focused on best practices consistent with accounting principles. generally recognized (GAAP) before the initial public offering. On February 14, Uber did not release the results of his driver in the fourth quarter.

The question remains whether the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of the United States will decide that these positions on the salaries of drivers, divided semi-public by Uber for at least six quarters, must be disclosed in the prospectus IPO and the quarterly reports of the company. public company. One of the indicators will be whether the competing US company Lyft shares the details on driver earnings and incentives when it makes public its IPO, which could happen next week (paywall).

How important are these pilot-specific line items? It depends on who you ask. An investor, for example, might be less interested in the details of the driver's remuneration than the amount remaining for Uber after the payment of these expenses. The same investor could simply look at Uber's net income versus gross bookings to gauge the health of the business.

But investors are not the only ones interested in Uber's business, and road-worthiness campaigning could be very informative for drivers looking for a better look at their wages. Drivers have long suspected Uber to take a larger share of their fares. The vastness of Uber's driver network, which has about 3 million drivers worldwide, makes it difficult to say with certainty whether the average driver earns less. The elements of the product line to the counterpart product account offered another way of seeing things.

In the first quarter of 2018, for example, gross bookings increased 55% over the same period last year to $ 11.3 billion. However, overall driver revenues (net profits plus incentives and miscellaneous payments) increased by 49% to $ 8.3 billion. From January 2017 to June 2018, the share of gross driver bookings increased from 76% to 72%.

These numbers provide insight into the complex and often opaque machinery of how Uber pays drivers. Unless the SEC asks Uber to bring back these numbers, this slight transparency may disappear.