I've always wondered if uber were to abandon their ongoing development efforts and focus on support and maintenance, would they would actually be profitable? It seems to me they would need a fraction of the tech workers they currently support.
Fact check: R&D spend for three months ending June 2019 was $3.06B. Reported loss for three months ending June 2019 was $5.24B. So, already false.
Now take away the one-time IPO expense of $3.9B, and we're not even close to being true. Further take away the $300M "IPO driver appreciation award" and you end up with a $1B loss for three months ending June 2019. In other words, the quarterly R&D spend is over three times the size of the quarterly loss.
But that IPO stock-comp expense is largely attributable to R&D, so if you want to subtract that from the losses to look at a more cash-focused analysis you have to substract that cost from the R&D side as well.
Of the $3.95B total stock expense, $2.56B was from R&D, which suggests cash cost that quarter was more like $910m (still a lot!)
To my mind this quarter shouldn't be used at all in this kind of discussion since its so messy. e.g.: I take your point, but that $2.56B is the culmination of over ten years of R&D compensation. It's not at all representative of the company's broader financials.
OP's inference that Uber's quarterly loss is more than double Uber's quarterly R&D costs in general shouldn't be propped up by a moment in time observation.
Based on year 2018 numbers, Uber needs to grow their revenue by 9.3%, and reduce their expenses by 6% to book a 0.1B profit. Assuming an average employee expense of 230k per year, Uber letting go 435 puts them 6.66% on the way to profitable expense reduction.
