Yeah, looks like a few years they dipped into the red a bit, but not much. (Scroll down to the profit vs revenue chart). https://www.vox.com/2018/2/1/16961598/amazon-jeff-bezos-record-profit-11-quarter-q4-2017-earnings
Indeed, humans can be pretty awful.
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Your points are true.
However, the dynamics at play with scooter rentals seem fairly straightforward. At some point, you’ll have to make more off rentals than the cost of purchasing a scooter and maintaining the infrastructure to support it, else all you’ll ever do is lose money.
Between theft, vandalism, and simple degradation (they seem to have forgotten that it rains and snows heavily, sometimes, in places that are not Santa Monica) the life expectancy of these things has got to be measured in the single-digit weeks, I imagine. And there’s a LOT of investment behind the scenes in something like this, in terms of software platform, partnerships, support, paying chargers, paying cities, etc. etc.
Just wait until a few of these things blow up, because of faulty or damaged batteries. “I blew my legs off riding a Bird/Lime!” Not going to be good for business.
I too remain skeptical of the business model.
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There’s a business model? Is it sculpted from polystyrene? The kind easily set ablaze? All I see are black holes, endlessly sucking dollars, maybe laundered.
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Here’s the first paragraph from the NYT when Amazon posted its first profit:
After losing $2.8 billion since it was founded in 1995, the online retailer Amazon.com said yesterday that it had made its first quarterly profit, $5 million, validating at least in part its strategy to grow rapidly first and worry about profits later.
I think you live on a different planet than I do…
In my neck of the words, 2.8 BILLION is an unbelievable amount of money for an entirely unestablished company. Until the current day madness, I can’t recall investors writing a blank check of that size for a new company ever.
Also, remember that during that same time period, Barnes and Noble made $17 million in a quarter, (this was before it was bleeding…), so Amazon was looking at spending 20 times more money than they could every hope to make in order to take over the market. Not terribly surprising with that sort of subsidy, they did.
Of course, as it turned out, Amazon’s take over of the the book business was hardly even the point - it was really only a stepping stone, and now books are essentially a negligible part of the business (although now the publishers desperately pray that Amazon chooses to remain interested in the business rather than simply end the American publishing market by spending its resources on more profitable ventures…)
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2.8 billion over a number of years is nothing.
Uber lost 2.8 billion in just 2016: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/new-money/2017/1/9/14194202/uber-lost-22-billion-9-months
They lost 4.5 billion in 2017 and another $1.8 billion in 2018. But one can at least see a path to profitability. (It involves screwing gig workers and likely some other shady shit, but that’s a whole ‘nother argument.)
Amazon had a pretty clear path to profitability, even if it had to lose some money first.
Bird scooters has lost nearly a billion dollars without any path to profitability. That’s insane, and 1999-2001 all over again.
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Help me figure this out. Investors fork over mucho cash for startups to quickly burn through. Said startups belatedly or never show a profit. So those torched cash piles are tax-deductible business losses. Thus the investors haven’t really lost much. Is that how it works?
Basically. And they’re happy to do it in pursuit of getting in early on the next Facebook, Twitter, etc.
In fact, not that long ago, startups in the Bay Area got dinged for not burning through money FAST enough. If you had a slow burn, it was seen as evidence you’re not trying to grow fast enough and are too timid to hit it big.
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Also, the idea is that you recoup your losses on the companies that succeed. As a small investor myself, I’m suspicious about that.
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