Uber’s Q1 Profit Thanks To Sale Of Grab

Uber was able to turn a $2.5 billion profit during the first quarter of 2018, due to the company selling its Southeast Asian business to Grab and its Russian business to Yandex.

According to Bloomberg, Uber revealed it has $6.3 billion in cash, not including a $1.5 billion term loan that the company inked in March. Uber valued the paper gain from selling its Russian and Southeast Asian businesses in exchange for stock in local companies at $2.9 billion.

But the company also had a loss of $312 million before interest, taxes and other expenses in the same quarter.

CEO Dara Khosrowshahi seems comfortable with the losses at this time, believing that ride-hailing can fund promising but unprofitable businesses. With that in mind, the company is focusing on new areas of growth, spending on food delivery, autonomous vehicle research and electric bikes.

“Cars are to us what books are to Amazon,” Khosrowshahi said at a Goldman Sachs conference in February.

The company also reported that net revenue, after accounting for payments to drivers, grew 70 percent year over year to $2.6 billion. Gross bookings, the total value of the fares drivers bring in, only grew by 55 percent to $11.3 billion.

Uber also announced that investment firms Coatue Management, Altimeter and TPG plan to buy between $400 million and $600 million in Uber stock from existing shareholders, a deal that values Uber at $62 billion.

The company is hoping for an IPO next year, and if that doesn’t happen, some of its investors could sell their shares on the private market.

“We are off to a terrific start in 2018,” Khosrowshahi said in a statement, noting that the growth of Uber’s rides business has been exceeding internal expectations. “Given the size of the opportunity ahead of us and our goal of making Uber a true mobility platform, we plan to reinvest any over-performance even more aggressively this year, both in our core business as well as in big bets like Uber Eats globally.”