Uber may be the world’s best-known transportation aggregator, but the company’s financial health has been a cause for concern for some time now. All the controversies and the slew of lawsuits it has faced in recent times from drivers, customers and government regulators, followed by the multi-million dollar settlements, have only drained the company’s resources even further. However, most of Uber’s troubles seem to stem from the fact that the ride-sharing market is becoming an increasingly competitive industry, with new contenders joining the fray not just in the U.S., but also many other key regions around the world. With competition getting the better of Uber, the company exited from the super-competitive Chinese market earlier this year, selling off its business to the local market-leader, Didi Chuxing, after suffering huge losses in the previous years.
However, those losses in China were apparently only the tip of the iceberg, as according to a new report from Bloomberg News, Uber has apparently accumulated over $2.2 billion in losses during just the first nine months of this year. In Q3 alone, the company reportedly piled up a whopping $800 million loss from its global operations. What’s worse is that the figure doesn’t even include the massive losses the company incurred from its Chinese operations, which, as mentioned earlier, was offloaded a few months earlier after the company had reportedly lost around $2 billion trying to break Didi’s iron grip on the country’s ride-sharing market. The sale was reported to have brought the company $1 billion in cash.
With losses from its Chinese business now effectively written off, the company reportedly made $1.7 billion in net revenues during the last quarter, which is a significant increase sequentially from $1.1 billion during the previous quarter. The company generated $3.76 billion in net revenues during the first three quarters of this year and is expected to surpass $5.5 billion for the whole year. Overall bookings amounted to $5.4 billion during the third quarter and around $14.2 billion during the first three quarters of this year. It will be interesting to see how Uber increases its business in the face of growing competition from new entrants like Maven on the one hand and old foes like Lyft on the other.