Uber Reports It Lost $2.8 Billion In 2016 Including $991 Million In Q4

On Good Friday, when markets were closed and when the entire financial world was tuned out, and when certainly no one was supposed to pay attention, Uber, the most highly valued – at $62.5 billion – and the most scandal plagued tech startup in the world, took the until now unprecedented step of disclosing its audited revenues and losses for the Q4 and for the full year of 2016 “cementing its place as the most heavily loss-making private company in the history of Silicon Valley” (as reported by the Financial Times).

Wolf Richter (WolfStreet.com)

…On Friday, Uber…disclosed that:

it lost $2.8 billion [in 2016] before interest, tax, depreciation, and employee stock options – the latter likely being a big chunk, as the earnings of publicly traded companies that award stock-based compensation, such as Twitter, regularly show. Translated into a net loss, including the expense for stock-based compensation [the number [would have been] dizzying but Uber wisely didn’t disclose it…

In Q4 alone, it lost $991 million before interest, tax, depreciation, and stock-based compensation, up 5% from the losses in Q3 and nearly double its loss in Q1.

Its revenue soared over 200% from Q1 to reach $2.9 billion in Q4. For the whole year, revenue reached $6.5 billion as Uber has expanded at break-neck speed into more than 70 countries, stirring up numerous hornets’ nests of local and national laws and regulations.

…[Below] is the image of its skyrocketing 2016 quarterly revenues and ballooning losses before interest, tax, depreciation, and stock-based compensation:

Uber recognizes the entire fare of shared carpool trips as revenue, though it then still has to pay the driver. This has the effect of inflating net revenues, though it conforms to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). For trips that are not shared, it only recognizes its commission (generally 25% of the fare) as revenues.

If you burn $3 billion in cash a year, and maybe more in 2017, at what point do you run out of rope? How sustainable is the will of investors to plow billions into Uber, only to see this cash go up in smoke in such a short time?