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It seems pretty clear that Softbank were badly misvaluing We and Uber. The second they hit the public markets suddenly Softbank could no longer sustain their pa
by Traster 7y ago
It seems pretty clear that Softbank were badly misvaluing We and Uber. The second they hit the public markets suddenly Softbank could no longer sustain their paper valuations which is causing this loss. It's kind of funny that Softbank can mark its own homework on this - they buy the company and then because the investment isn't liquid they can basically choose any valuation they want for the companies they own. It'll be interesting to see how sceptical people are of the other companies in the Softbank portfolio. For example, they acquired ARM for $31Bn- what are they claiming it's worth now?
- sam_lowry_ 7y agoArm is a de facto monopoly, WeWork and Uber are not
- mtgx 7y agoArm is already freaking out about RISC-V, because some large companies (Western Digital, Nvidia, Alibaba, etc) have started preferring using the RISC-V ISA over Arm. Even Google's recent OpenTitan uses a RISC-V processor, when the company's own proprietary "Titan" predecessor used Arm Cortex-M3. It probably won't be long now before SoftBank/Arm resorts to patent trolling RISC-V chip makers.
- dana321 7y agoExactly. ARM's intellectual property (ie. CPUs) is used in more devices than Intel.
- juskrey 7y agoHow can one value something fat-tailed?
- treis 7y ago>Softbank were badly misvaluing We and Uber. I don't think these two really belong together. We is probably worth nothing, and even that might be generous. Uber is worth billions with the only real debate being how many billions.
- navigatesol 7y agoThis is Monday morning quarter backing. Everyone knows We is/was worthless. But Uber,AirBnB,Slack, Tesla, Beyond Meat..all's well.
- LandR 7y ago>Uber is worth billions with the only real debate being how many billions. Assuming Uber ever turns profitable.
- wolco 7y agoThey expanded quickly but haven't reached profitability. Raising prices/shuting down growth still wouldn't be enough to reach that point. If Lyft died and could raise prices perhaps as it stands now they are not worth billions because of debt/losses.
- dentemple 7y agoWeWork has actual real-estate assets. So, they do have some worth. Certainly not Softbank's valuation-levels of worth, but it's still not nothing.
- levthedev 7y agoWeWork, for the most part, does not own actual real-estate assets. They mostly have actual real-estate liabilities - leases. They do own a relatively small amount of property, like their partial ownership of the Lord and Taylor building, which for reference is now considered a huge mistake (it's bleeding money).
- bpt3 7y agoIf Uber never figures out how to turn a profit at scale, it'll be worth approximately $0 at some point in the future.