Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…A big problem there is that there probably is a lot of growth happening in ride sharing, but they've also been losing share in the US in their core markets to Lyft over the last year. There's growth happening in some markets, but attrition happening in others. Yes. This is something that was a little buried also in the S1, but you can find where they come out and say, in 2017, our ride sharing category position in the US and Canada was significantly impacted by adverse publicity events, which we covered. Although the rate of decline in our ride sharing category position has since "moderated", our ride sharing category position generally declined in 2018 in the substantial majority of the regions in which we operate, impacted in part by, of course, heavy subsidies and discounts by our competitors in various markets that we felt compelled to match in order to remain competitive. The takeaway here is, I think the important word there is moderated. They are still losing share in these core ride sharing markets. Anyone who wanted to blame delete Uber for Lyft's resurgence and say, but we're all good now, we're growing share again, it's just not the case. That's looking at growth, and of course, the way that these IPOs tend to get valued as growth stocks were early in a company's life, there's lots of growth ahead, they're going to get more profitable over time. They're both going to get more profitable over time and continue to grow at these great rates that they've been growing, not like a little 10% public company growth rate, but these startups growing 30%-40% per year growth rates. I said, get more profitable. Now let's dig into that and specifically into contribution margin. The contribution margin for the core platform business, which is of course, the ride sharing, and Uber Eats, which was 18% a year ago, was actually negative 3% in Q4 of last year. Really, a dangerous trend there, where we start to see them. That's a direct reflection of the subsidies and competition.…

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