Uber Burned $600 Million In Q2: Key Results

With Uber once again in the media spotlight, following yesterday's WSJ report that several mutual funds have – for the first time ever – cut their valuation of the world's most valuable private company by up to 15%, and today's lengthy Reuters expose questioning just what the company's true value is, moments ago Uber's Q2 financials were leaked courtesy of Axios, which reports the following summary: gross bookings up 17% in Q2, number of trips taken up 150% in the past year while the company's adjusted loss fell modestly while EBITDA improved fractionally.

Still, despite a modest improvement in operations, the company still burned $600 million in Q2, reducing its cash from $7.2Bn to $6.6Bn.

Some more details, via Axios:

• Gross bookings rose 17% in the second quarter to $8.7 billion (and doubled from a year earlier).
• Adjusted net revenue was $1.75 billion in Q2 vs $1.5 billion in Q1 and around $800 million in Q2 2016
• Adjusted net loss fell almost 9% quarter-over-quarter to $645 million and over 14% year-over-year.
• Q2 EBITDA loss was $534 million, down from $598 million in Q1. Uber's global ride-share business was margin positive last quarter, which is a flip from Q1.
• Global trips increased 150% year-over-year, including 90% growth in developed markets and over 250% growth in developing markets. This excludes China, which Uber exited last summer in exchange for an equity stake in Didi Chuxing. It includes Russia, where Uber's recently-announced partnership with Yandex has yet to be approved by local regulators.
• Revenue note: Uber is no longer reporting adjusted net revenue to its investors, due to new guidance from the SEC.
• Cash: $6.6 billion at quarter's end, down from around $7.2 billion at the end of Q1.
• Tips: Uber drivers have earned around $50 million in tips between when the program was rolled out in select markets on June 20 and the beginning of this week. For context, Lyft reported a similar $50 million figure for a 2.5 month period ending in the middle of this past June, but that was for a longer time period and for all of its markets (Lyft originally launched tipping nearly five years ago, generating over $250 million to date).

All in all, a modest improvement but not nearly enough to leave a major dent in the company's cash burning ways. Still, it is an improvement: putting Uber's roughly $600MM in quarterly cash burn in context, it is roughly half that of Tesla, which as reported earlier last month, burned through a record $1.16 billion in the second quarter.