Lyft has announced some of its financial numbers for 2017, and they are pretty astounding. The company brought in $1 billion in revenue in 2017, which is a 168-percent increase year-over-year. That is compared to Uber only getting about 61-percent growth in the same time period. That means that Lyft’s revenue outpaced Uber’s in 2017 by about 2.75x. That’s pretty impressive, and the fourth quarter was the largest for Lyft in 2017, which isn’t too surprising with all of the holidays going on, and New Years Eve as well – a day where most people are relying on Lyft, Uber or Taxi’s to get home after drinking to bring in the new year.
The company did well in 2017, thanks to all of the bad press that Uber received in 2017. Uber’s founder and now former-CEO, Travis Kalanick ended up having to resign from the company, after many bad stories hit the press. Including a video of him berating an Uber driver (ironically), as well him not bringing a great culture to Uber as a whole. So the board decided to let Kalanick go, and have been replacing not only the CEO, but also other exec’s at the company recently. Then there was also the lawsuit with Alphabet’s subsidiary Waymo. Waymo alleged that a former employee Anthony Levandowski had taken some of its LiDAR designs over to Uber, and used it on its Otto self-driving trucks. That led to a pretty big lawsuit and ended with Alphabet getting a stake in Uber, as it didn’t go to trial. But those two big stories in 2017 led Lyft to picking up more customers and bringing in more revenue.
Lyft and Uber are both private companies, so they don’t actually have to announce their financials every quarter or even every year. However, both companies are looking to go public in the future – Uber will likely be first – and they want the public to know how successful the company actually is. Lyft is backed by GM right now, pretty heavily. And it is even using GM’s first electric car, the Chevy Bolt, for its self-driving car program. So it’s likely that Lyft will stay private for a few more years.