Uber has already lost nearly $1.3 billion this year

By Lulu Chang Published August 26, 2016

It may be one of the most ubiquitous companies around, but that doesn’t mean Uber is doing all that well. At least, not when it comes to making a profit. In fact, the transportation giant is doing the exact opposite of that, with Bloomberg reporting that Uber has already lost $1.27 billion in the first eight months of 2016 alone. Really, it’s nothing new for the company, which only recently said that it was turning a profit in the U.S.

A big part of the problem? Its drivers.

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According to Uber’s head of finance, Gautam Gupta, who spoke to Uber investors on Friday, the ride-hailing service lost around $520 million in the first three months of the year and another $750 million in the second quarter, $100 million of which came from the U.S. Subsidies for Uber’s drivers were blamed for much of these shortfalls. Looks like Uber’s investments in self-driving technology can’t pay off fast enough.

“You won’t find too many technology companies that could lose this much money, this quickly,” Aswath Damodaran, a business professor at New York University, told Bloomberg. “For a private business to raise as much capital as Uber has been able to is unprecedented.” Losing that much capital is also pretty crazy — Amazon, for example, lost a whopping $1.4 billion in 2000, whereupon CEO Jeff Bezos fired 15 percent of his employees. Uber certainly hasn’t taken measures that drastic (yet), but the company has continued to take a larger share of its drivers’ fares.

The silver lining, however, is that Uber finally appears to be mitigating its previously gargantuan losses in China. Back in July, the Silicon Valley-based firm managed to make a deal with its biggest Chinese competitor, Didi Chuxing, obtaining 17.5 percent of the company’s business and a $1 billion investment. In return, Uber is pulling out of China. Given that the company lost $2 billion in its two years of attempted operations (and perhaps more), waving the white flag seems like a strategic move.

So sure, Uber may be the most valuable startup in history. But not all is necessarily well.

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Fascinated by the effects of technology on human interaction, Lulu believes that if her parents can use your new app…

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