If this week’s results show a profit like last quarter’s, the company may at last be on the road to respectability
It has 120 million customers, takes $10bn worth of bookings a month, and, it transpired this year, more or less had the French president on speed-dial, doing its bidding. But can Uber turn a profit?
The San Francisco-based ride-hailing giant squealed into “free cash flow”, as it puts it, in the last quarter, after racking up $23bn (20bn) in losses in its first heady decade or so. On Tuesday, investors will see if it can repeat the trick in its third-quarter results.
Since its damp squib of a flotation in May 2019, Uber’s share price has been on the kind of hair-raising ride you might expect from a desperately inexperienced driver relying on a shaky satnav. It hit rock bottom, like pretty much all transport stocks, when Covid lockdowns first began in 2020. By 2021, it had trebled in value, when people realised they were going to need more pizzas delivered.
But the past year has seen a steady decline. For many, the simple act of going out and spending is a pre-Covid, pre-crisis habit – and with a scarcity of drivers, rocketing fuel costs and boring old stuff such as employment law weighing on Uber, the kind of loss-leading fares that attracted a generation of users can’t be sustained.
The only fillip for shareholders came this year around the time of the publication of the Uber Files – a global Guardian-led investigation into the firm’s nefarious practices in...
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