In fact, the central concept of venture capital is premised on the idea that businesses start out unprofitable but become profitable as volumes scale.
To what extent any of this is the case for Uber is worth debating. So feel free to have that debate, and bring forth new information or new arguments that support your thesis.
And if you're subsidising rides below cost because you're trying to grow your market and you have piles of VC cash so you don't care that you're burning through money, then eventually you're going to run out of that money and will be in trouble if you can't raise any more.
Time will tell whether Uber was building a sustainable business or just burning through VC cash.
Winners don't quit, so Uber is dead to capital now: it was always based on maximum evilness and all the stuff about disrupting and ridesharing was mere window dressing.
Note to capital, wherever it is: this is what you get when you go by personality rather than studying the fundamentals of a business. You can't simply pick the most toxic individual or company, claim they're going to kill everybody else, and then prop them up with valuation. The valuation didn't fail but your pet Dr. Evil did, and that was your proxy for maintaining the 'killer' behavior. Unless or until capital can be personified as evil AIs that cannot die, this was never really an optimal strategy for capital.
Particularly not if you can't set up an operation in an Western city with expensive taxi services without losing money on every ride you operate even before centralised overheads are taken into account.
From their 2015 financials, it looks like revenues have been consistently higher than cost of sales.
Source: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/can-uber-ever-deliver...
According to financials from 2015, they have higher revenues than cost of sales:
www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/can-uber-ever-deliver-part-one-understanding-ubers-bleak-operating-economics.html
This suggests to me that marginal rides are profitable, even if they aren't profitable enough to cover fixed costs of software development or investments into new geographic markets.
From their 2015 financials, it looks like revenues have been consistently higher than cost of sales.
Source: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/can-uber-ever-deliver...
Quick Forbes link I found https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2014/07/02/ubers-newe...
Nonetheless, my impression is that this is more the exception than the rule, based on the financials I linked to earlier.
I'm not saying this will ever offset their increasing losses, but that is what always seemed the long term goal of monopoly.
> I thought the whole point of subsidizing rides was(as OP comments pointed out) to raise demand, both for drivers and riders, they first entice both ways with the promise of lower rates and higher payoffs, then slowly increase their cut of the pie against the driver's payoff and increase the rates on riders.
Right, and by the logic that decreasing prices raises demand, increasing prices will decrease demand.
That's my point, and the point of critics that are often ignored. Their customers will bail the moment they start getting charged the $25 their $10 ride actually costs. And that increase will be to break even. Not make any money. Just break even.
Uber will never achieve a monopoly. There are buses, bicycles, and used cars for $1500. People aren't going to pay $600 per month on a ride hailing service. I've already ditched Uber, and so have many of my peers, in favor of alternatives that save money. And that's without significant price hikes yet.
The fundamental economics of having a private driver have not changed. An app doesn't change what it costs to pay someone to drive you everywhere. I hate being critical because it's often a waste of time, but Uber is sincerely one of the worst investments that Silicon Valley has ever produced.
Also known as losing money on every ride but making it up in volume.