"Turning a profit" has almost no meaning, particularly with mark-to-market investments in the mix. More concretely Uber's business has never generated positive cash flow (i.e. taken in more money in a given period than they spent in that same period) and are projecting they will reach that milestone for the first time in Q4 of this year.

A lot of movie productions infamously do not have positive cash flow. They deduct profits by creating artificial expenses charged by other companies providing services.

If they did have profits they’d get double taxed (once on the company’s profits and then again in payroll taxes if they decide to disburse profits to employees). They’d also have to pay out royalties on profits in some cases.

It’s usually pointless to look at reported profits from growth oriented startups, because if they reported income it means they are not properly reinvesting into growth (hiring engineers, bonuses for engineers, marketing, etc).

It’s much better to look at unit economics. Frankly, if cab companies made it work there’s no reason Uber cannot, and no reason the unit economics for Uber would be negative. It’s not as if Uber et al invented something new. They’ve basically improved almost every aspect of the taxi system it replaced, and done so with software technology so the marginal cost of the improvements is almost $0.

Just because the product is labor driven and low margin doesn’t mean it cannot be profitable. Amazon is a fundamentally low margin business as well (retail). The margins don’t matter so long as it can scale well, and software almost always does.

> A lot of movie productions infamously do not have positive cash flow.

This is a nuance of an accounting trick used specifically in Hollywood and isn't relevant to this discussion whatsoever.

> It’s usually pointless to look at reported profits from growth oriented startups

Uber isn't a startup anymore. It's a publicly traded company.

> It’s much better to look at unit economics.

It's not. Unit economics are commonly used to drive an overall cash flow / profitable capability of most startups because their profitability is usually highly irregular when they are subscale. Unit economics are usually a proxy / indicator of gross margin and gross margin is an indicator of operating cash flow and/or net income.

> Just because the product is labor driven and low margin doesn’t mean it cannot be profitable. Amazon is a fundamentally low margin business as well (retail). The margins don’t matter so long as it can scale well,

Generally true, but there's a few things here that are important to consider:

- In most recent years, Amazon has started driving overall profitability via AWS profits which far outsize their retail/ecomm profits.

- What you're referring to specifically is free cash flow. From Bezos: "“When forced to choose between optimizing the appearance of our GAAP accounting and maximizing the present value of future cash flows, we’ll take the cash flows.” Jeff Bezos is very focused on this “absolute dollar free cash flow metric.” You will see many people talk about Amazon’s focus on “growth” vs. margins, but the right focus is instead absolute dollar fee cash flow."[0]

[0] - https://25iq.com/2014/04/26/a-dozen-things-i-have-learned-fr...

> Uber isn't a startup anymore. It's a publicly traded company.

THIS

I don’t get it. Even publicly traded companies try to zero out end of year profits via reinvestment and salary bonuses. If you did not then you accumulate unused cash which if you decide to pay out to employees later gets double taxed.

But in any case Uber’s industries are still highly competitive (ride sharing and food delivery), so there are plenty of ways for them to reinvest profits rather than accumulate a war chest like a company like Apple (which also was able to do partly because of a tax haven country).

Plus if Uber didn’t reinvest profits their hundreds of competitors would do that and get an edge, many of which are smaller private startups

> If you did not then you accumulate unused cash which if you decide to pay out to employees later gets double taxed.

This is precisely why you look at a Cash Flow statement.

>A lot of movie productions infamously do not have positive cash flow.

You're confusing cash flow with declared income/loss. The shenanigans pulled on shows like "Columbo" and "The Rockford Files", resulted in high-quality, long-successful shows showing "losses" by the studio, are classic examples. Search on "Hollywood Accounting."

Corporations do the same thing via end of year bonuses and dividends. Those things are considered expenses too and can be used to offset income. If Uber is going to get taxed 20% on their excess income for the year or they can give out some bonuses to their employees, incentive bonuses to their drivers, and ramp up their marketing spend, what do you think they'll do?

You can't just declare 0 income. You have to actually spend it to declare 0 income.

Minor note that dividends are below the net profit line. You can't pay a dividend without profit.

When talking about investments, "profit" is generally a synonym for "net income." Of course, many people may disagree on which specific income measure should really be used to represent the general concept of profit, but there are pretty good arguments for net income being that value. Investopedia [0] has an article that discusses the difference; Motley Fool [1] argues it's the same.

If we want to say that positive cash flow is a better measure here, you can argue that, but that wasn't the claim made in the comment I replied to.

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/122414/net-income-s...

[1] https://www.fool.com/the-blueprint/net-income-vs-net-profit/

>Uber turned a profit in 2021Q2

Yes, though read this, then do the math.

"Net income attributable to Uber Technologies, Inc. was $1.1 billion, including $272 million in stock-based compensation expense. Net income benefited from unrealized gains of $1.4 billion and $471 million due to the revaluation of Uber’s equity investments in Didi and Aurora, respectively." (Uber 2021Q2)

Your citation says they lost money.

You may be looking at "trailing 12 months" -- take a look at the quarterly charts, which do indeed report profits.

They lost over 20 billion dollars and made a meagre profit in one quarter of one year thanks to Uber Eats during the pandemic.

Ah, healthy business.

So made money on also questionable business on both supply, delivery side. And with actual cost realisation probably also on customer side. Doesn't look too healthy.