Uber Lifts Financial Hood, Billions In Sales And Losses

The ride-hailing giant Uber Technologies has given investors and observers a glimpse under the hood of sorts. Bloomberg News reports that the technology upstart has pointed to its top and bottom lines as evidence that revenue growth is overshadowing the red ink that is accumulating.

And the numbers come against a backdrop where headlines surrounding the company have been decidedly negative.

The company, as Bloomberg stated via information provided to the newswire from Uber, has said that it has more than doubled its gross bookings to $20 billion. And in other financial metrics, the firm stated that revenue stands at $6.5 billion, and net losses are $2.8 billion, adjusted to exclude the business tied to China, which had been sold last year.

These are annual figures, and Uber did not give first quarter data to Bloomberg ahead of showing that data to investors, noting, however, that results were “in line with expectations.”

Drilling down a bit, the firm, which recently sported a $69 billion valuation, said it had seen gross bookings jump in the fourth quarter by 28 percent year over year to $6.9 billion, and the top line stood at $2.9 billion, itself a 74 percent boost sequentially from the third quarter.

The 74 percent growth in sales over that timeframe handily outpaced the 6.1 percent bump in losses to $991 million.

Perhaps notably, the net losses do not, in fact, take in impact of stock compensation and the buying of, say, real estate or automobiles. And revenue, notes Bloomberg, is tied to the amount of money gleaned from fares by the company, with an exception made for carpooling, where the entire fare accrues to Uber.