Revenue 6854
Cost of Revenue 4026
Operations and Support 574
Sales and Marketing 1263
Research and Development 587
General and Administrative 632
Depreciation & Amortization 254
Total Costs 7336
I wonder (and am too lazy too try to find out) what portion of sales and marketing is driver-focused. One could maybe argue (as the grandparent did) that they should be spending less on rider marketing, but marketing to get drivers in the door seems pretty important. Dunno what their driver churn rate is, but keeping the pool of drivers large is critical for their service.
From what I’ve come to understand you are right on the money. All these “sharing economy” models rely heavily on churn and burn like many other less than solid business models like MLM.
I would love to see the breakdown of drivers and their immigration status, because from what I can gather, what is happening here is not any different than in the past of America’s history where the whole business model relies on the exploitation of “immigrant” labor that knows no better and is easily exploited, aka their unrealized labor value is converted into profit, or better states, benefits and riches for the executives.
Bingo. Andrew Chen, formerly of Uber, says exactly that in his excellent new book The Cold Start problem. The driver side is the hard side of the market and must be constantly tended.
Interesting because the taxi business had all that figured out already. It was a profitable business and drivers stuck around for decades. Does Uber have too much overhead to ever be profitable?
The taxi industry had it figured out only on a smaller scale. Rideshare reaches more people and rides than taxis did. In most of America, taxis were never a serious option outside of niche use cases like getting a ride from an airport. Even in NYC, where street hailing is possible, that only ever really worked in Manhattan (and not even all of Manhattan); and medallion caps meant driver supply could never fully meet rider demand, unlike for rideshare, so getting drivers wasn't a realistic problem.
Rideshare expanded the reach of taxi-like services to more regions, people, and use cases. It's now viable to travel without renting a car in many US cities - you can see this by how rideshare affected rental car companies. That's what makes the rideshare business hard: the places where they didn't have existing competition, because that's where the matching is harder and the economics not as easy.
It's a similar story for food delivery: GrubHub/Seamless operated in core areas of cities like NYC for many years (since the 90s in NYC, I think). Uber Eats brings that service to far more places, and that's where the challenge comes from in that business.
>Rideshare expanded the reach of taxi-like services to more regions, people, and use cases.
You don't need rideshare for delivering service to large areas.
In my country we have a taxi app which can be used by any taxi driver. If you request a drive, your call can be seen by all drivers which are at a certain distance from you. That distance can be se by each driver.
One or more drivers will reply to your request and you get to pick the driver.
And you can either pay directly to the driver using cash or card or you can be charged through the app.
The fee for the drivers is very small so almost all drivers use it.
And the money are not subject to tax evasion, they stay in the local economy. Taxi drivers have wages, social insurance, health insurance and pension funds. They also have a valid license to transport people and are regularly checked to be able to hold that license.
Depends on the city/locale. In NYC most drivers don’t own their medallions, they drive shifts for someone else’s medallion.
In fact I’ve had a lot of conversations with Uber and taxi drivers who started as taxi drivers, switched to Uber when the bonuses were lucrative, and then some of them switched back because they liked the predictability of a fixed shift and not being ordered around by a machine. Others felt exactly the opposite.
Sales and marketing should be labeled price discrimination. It’s all incentives to match driver earnings and rider costs to respective minima (maxima).
> The term cost of revenue refers to the total cost of manufacturing and delivering a product or service to consumers. [0]
It sounds like "developing the core product" falls entirely under this bucket, so with what others are saying about what falls under other buckets is right, then the one that looks most cuttable to me is actually "Research and Development". That sounds like the "experimental new stuff that may go nowhere" bucket, and if it's eliminated it would also put them just above break-even. Maybe they could focus on improving profits for their core product for a while before bringing that back.
Maybe there is necessary stuff included in it though, which I guess means that wouldn't be an option.
All tech companies put most of their engineering under “research and development”. It lets you capitalize your expenses and smear them out over many years.
Kinda, they can classify the activity of the engineers project work as r&d, and capilise the appropriate amount on the balance sheet (i.e. does not show under r&d expenses). Over time that would then be shown as depreciation, not r&d. You can't captilise an engineers time that is maintenance work.
A quick look at Ubers annual report states they do not capitalise r&d costs and instead expense it as incurred.
If you look at their financials, they show gross bookings, which include both the full billed values for food and delivery, and transportation of people. Revenues only show their share of that total.
In regards to incentives, it looks like a complicated question, I found an interesting outline[2]
Cost of Good Sold is the variable cost most directly associated with bringing in the revenue. So the raw materials for making a physical product, or the salaries paid to service workers who are billed out hourly. Anything that is strictly mandatory to create the product or service.
Cost of Revenue goes a step further, and includes the next layer of costs that are necessary to cause sales to happen for a given product/service line in a reporting period. That includes things like sales and marketing, and distribution. Basically anything that would cause the revenue to stop coming in fairly immediately if it wasn't done.
Neither includes R&D to create the product/service in the first place, or general overhead.
It's a clever way to disguise their unit economics to look better.
Their marketing budget is mostly going to pay drivers.
Put another way - you could be saying - why not pay drivers EVEN less? Well, they're paying them the least they can already. You can be sure of that.
If they did actually paid the drivers more and not disguise it as marketing - then their unit economics wouldn't look good - and when the business as a whole doesn't look good either - that's not a good look.
They can’t, that “S&M” is heavily focused on getting low information drivers into the service by smoke and mirrors about how wonderful it is to drive for them. They have to keep the rate of influx of new drivers at least above the rate of people realizing what a bad deal it is for them, aka churn.
If I remember correctly they spend a lot of money on marketing campaigns against any law that could hurt their business model. So slashing marketing might actually hurt them even more.
They only need some occasional reminders that might be targeted at the few people that haven't used or heard of friends or family using an Uber before.
Marketing is as much about keeping your customers from going to rival providers as it is about finding new customers. If you don't want people to leave you need to remind them why you're better than the exciting new company that's spending VC money to take your market share.