6 ms·

> They're not turning a profit now Uber turned a profit in 2021Q2. [0] Twitter now has had many profitable quarters. [1] Of course, cumulatively, they are both

• scarface74 5y ago
  Your citation says they lost money.
  • rsanek 5y ago
    You may be looking at "trailing 12 months" -- take a look at the quarterly charts, which do indeed report profits.
    • dmitriid 5y ago
      They lost over 20 billion dollars and made a meagre profit in one quarter of one year thanks to Uber Eats during the pandemic. Ah, healthy business.
      • Ekaros 5y ago
        So made money on also questionable business on both supply, delivery side. And with actual cost realisation probably also on customer side. Doesn't look too healthy.
• femto113 5y ago
  "Turning a profit" has almost no meaning, particularly with mark-to-market investments in the mix. More concretely Uber's business has never generated positive cash flow (i.e. taken in more money in a given period than they spent in that same period) and are projecting they will reach that milestone for the first time in Q4 of this year.
  • rsanek 5y ago
    When talking about investments, "profit" is generally a synonym for "net income." Of course, many people may disagree on which specific income measure should really be used to represent the general concept of profit, but there are pretty good arguments for net income being that value. Investopedia [0] has an article that discusses the difference; Motley Fool [1] argues it's the same. If we want to say that positive cash flow is a better measure here, you can argue that, but that wasn't the claim made in the comment I replied to. [0] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/122414/net-income-same-profit.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/122414/net-income-s... [1] https://www.fool.com/the-blueprint/net-income-vs-net-profit/ https://www.fool.com/the-blueprint/net-income-vs-net-profit/
  • chrischen 5y ago
    A lot of movie productions infamously do not have positive cash flow. They deduct profits by creating artificial expenses charged by other companies providing services. If they did have profits they’d get double taxed (once on the company’s profits and then again in payroll taxes if they decide to disburse profits to employees). They’d also have to pay out royalties on profits in some cases. It’s usually pointless to look at reported profits from growth oriented startups, because if they reported income it means they are not properly reinvesting into growth (hiring engineers, bonuses for engineers, marketing, etc). It’s much better to look at unit economics. Frankly, if cab companies made it work there’s no reason Uber cannot, and no reason the unit economics for Uber would be negative. It’s not as if Uber et al invented something new. They’ve basically improved almost every aspect of the taxi system it replaced, and done so with software technology so the marginal cost of the improvements is almost $0. Just because the product is labor driven and low margin doesn’t mean it cannot be profitable. Amazon is a fundamentally low margin business as well (retail). The margins don’t matter so long as it can scale well, and software almost always does.
    • masonic 5y ago
      >A lot of movie productions infamously do not have positive cash flow. You're confusing cash flow with declared income/loss. The shenanigans pulled on shows like "Columbo" and "The Rockford Files", resulted in high-quality, long-successful shows showing "losses" by the studio, are classic examples. Search on "Hollywood Accounting."
• tyingq 5y ago
  >Uber turned a profit in 2021Q2 Yes, though read this, then do the math. "Net income attributable to Uber Technologies, Inc. was $1.1 billion, including $272 million in stock-based compensation expense. Net income benefited from unrealized gains of $1.4 billion and $471 million due to the revaluation of Uber’s equity investments in Didi and Aurora, respectively." (Uber 2021Q2)