Name: Saudi Arabia’s $3.5bn bet on Uber | Lex
Uploaded: 2016-06-08T02:48:04.000Z
Duration: 3 min 51 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Past simple

Charles, overnight came news that Uber, the ride-hailing app,

has secured a 3 and a half billion dollar investment from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund.

The imperative

Let's start by asking, why on earth does Uber need this money?

I thought it was swimming in cash as it is.

It does have a lot of cash, and boy does it need a lot of cash.

I mean if you at its figures, it's growing at rates that are very hard to get your head around.

I mean we only know a little bit about it cuz it's a private company.

The sort of figures we have are (subject) come from a leak.

But effectively its first half revenues for last year were way more than the whole of the year before,

so [it's] growing at over 100% but still burning cash.

So the only reason it has a whole lot of cash is for a private company, and this is one of what the features that makes it really interesting.

It's raised a huge amount of money in private placements.

So this 3 and a half billion adds to something like 9 or 10 billion or more that's already been raised privately, and it's valuing it at 60 billion dollars so far already.

So it needs that cash because it's currently still at that growth phase that means you burn a lot of it investing in new growth in new cities (every) all the time.

And it hasn't yet reached that point of turning a profit as it were.

Okay, well in the old days of course, company if you wanted a load of cash from investors, you go to a stock exchange to get it.

Presumably an IPO is not on the cards here.

Is that because they don't want to IPO, they want to remain a private company?

Or is it because they don't have the profits yet to tell a compelling story.

Well it's interesting. I mean not having profits hasn't mean... didn't put off Amazon a long time ago.

But then whenever they score this sort of poor cash figure, they kind of got worried, Amazon.

So Uber seems to have an unusual degree of confidence that it can keep going as a private company in this kind of state.

Is it unwilling to go private... public? Yeah, absolutely.

I mean partly they've seen the sort of hassle you get when you become a public company, you get subjected to more scrutiny.

And Uber is arguably even more controversial than the presidence it's looking at, like Facebook.

Wherever it goes, wherever it tries to grow, it tends to attract its regulatory scrutiny, protests from local incumbents, the taxi companies it's competing against.

So, it's probably thinking, we will have an easier time if we can raise cash at this rather handsome evaluation, but keep away from all of that scrutiny.

And of course it avoids the hassle of external investors as well.

So if you're a Netflix or a Tesla Motors and you've constantly got people on your case about your profits and your cash flow,

Yeah, and that's a huge amount of the chief executive's time.

I mean Saudi is famously trying to diversify their economy away from heavy oil dependence.

Where does it fit into the scheme of things for them?

Well, Uber as a service is incredibly popular in Saudi Arabia.

Partly because women are not allowed to drive, 70-80% of Uber users in Saudi Arabia are women, and so it's growing quite fast there.

This is another advantage from Uber's point of view.

Saudi Arabia investing 3 and a half billion in this company means they know they're not going to get regulatory problems there, it's gonna remain a popular service.

As for Saudi Arabia, changing their economy this way, well of course it has a new economy shtick to it compared to the old oil-based economy they are.

Whether they actually gain any particular technological advantage by having the investment, I'm not so sure.

If Uber turns out to be profitable and makes a huge amount of money than the 60 billion evaluation,

if it matches what Facebook did, that might double or triple.

So a great investment from the financial point of view,

I struggle to see how Saudi Arabia's basic economy becomes less oil dependent just cuz they've made a good punt on a ride-sharing app though.