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Curious why you don't think they can survive with human drivers? Every financial report I've been able to get hard data out of seems to show them very close to
by phil21 9y ago
Curious why you don't think they can survive with human drivers? Every financial report I've been able to get hard data out of seems to show them very close to operational profitability. Somewhere within 10-20%.
I personally don't feel there is that much price sensitivity in the market to make a 15% price increase cause volumes to dip substantially. I could of course be wrong, but it seems to me Uber is at a point they could be "instantly" profitable if they simply decided to be and decided to stop expanding.
- dannyw 9y agoUber is already doing pretty well with price segmentation in the US (the Uber Express POOL comes with a forced 2 minute wait); they can certainly: - raise prices of uberX, price sensitive riders can still use POOL or Express POOL - reduce marketing and growth expenses; reframe KPIs and targets in term of "dollar ROI" instead of new rider/driver targets Uber absolutely works from a unit economics perspective. How do you think taxis exist?
- geofft 9y agoTaxis are usually a bit pricier and also don't subsidize a large team of software engineers at Silicon Valley salaries.
- CydeWeys 9y agoHere in NYC, the mortgage on a taxi medallion costs a lot more than the total salary of all Uber developers divided by the number of Uber drivers. There are other costs that go into taxis that Ubers don't have. Taxis have back-office support staff too (the people you call up to order one to you).
- geofft 9y agoUber and Lyft are basically equivalent services in cities they both serve. A 15% price increase for one is enough to drive lots of people to just default to the other.