2016 has not been a good year for the ride sharing giant Uber. In the first half of the year the company has reportedly managed to lose an astounding $1.27 billion. According to Bloomberg in the first quarter of the year Uber saw losses of $520 million before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization while the second quarter saw losses in excess of $750 million.
The losses have been caused by numerous problems, from an unsuccessful attempt to expand in China to the company’s ongoing price war with competitor Lyft. Uber’s war with Lyft has proven incredibly expensive thanks to the enormous amount of subsidies the company has paid out to attract drivers. Lyft is also hemorrhaging money; the Uber competitor is reportedly losing around $50 million a month.
While these numbers are staggering they don’t represent an immediate risk to Uber, which reportedly has around $8 billion in the bank from investors and had net revenues of $960 million in quarter one and $1.1 billion in the second. For the curious, Bloomberg’s report puts Uber’s loses in context with the losses of other major tech firms during the 2000s dot-com-boom.
