Though Uber’s troubles have been piling up, its losses have narrowed in the previous quarter. Still, it seems they aren’t enough diluted to lure leading senior-level executives to continue working at the ride-hailing behemoth. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Uber’s head of finance Gautam Gupta is departing the company in July to join another (presently unknown) San Francisco-based startup as its chief operating officer.
Gupta was appointed to the said role when the ride-hailing giant lost its previous CFO Brent Callinicos back in 2015. Prior to being appointed to the said role, he had been heading Uber’s business operations and finance for the past two years.
This is probably not the best time for the company’s financial head to call its quits since the ride-hailing giant had been insistently looking to steer itself back on track — lower losses, conquer more global geographies and most likely go public in a couple years. It has currently been decided that Uber’s head of strategic finance Prabir Adarkar will take over his responsibilities in the interim.
Commenting on his departure, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick in a statement said:
Gautam is a world-class financial talent. Over the last four years, he has been indispensable in helping build Uber from an idea into the business it is today. We couldn’t have done it without him, and I will miss his energy, focus, and infectious enthusiasm. All of us at Uber wish him well in this next challenge.
Though Uber is still a private company, it has started giving us an insight into its financial reports since the past quarter when the company was direly trying to divert our attention off its mountain of problems. It had been alleged of workplace sexual harassment and Alphabet’s self-driving car division, Waymo had just filed a patent infringement lawsuit and injunction against the ride-hailing giant.
Today, it has reported that on the back of revenues of $3.4 Billion, which is an 18 percent increase over the previous quarter, Uber has managed to narrow its losses down to $708 million. The Wall Street Journal states that the said figures don’t include employee stock compensations — meaning the other items. It’s gross bookings have increased by around 9 percent and it now has nearly $7.2 billion in cash on hand. Its losses stood at around $991 million in the previous quarter.
Speaking about the earnings reports, an Uber spokesperson in a statement said:
These results demonstrate that our business remains healthy and resilient as we focus on improving our culture, management, and relationship with drivers. The narrowing of our losses in the first quarter puts us on a good trajectory towards profitability.
This is an impressive turnaround but the company still needs to bog down and come up with alternate methods to satisfy customer and driver partner needs to maintain its brand value while further cutting down on losses. It also needs to cut down on its expenses that it has been incurring, around $1 million per week, to popularize its UberPOOL service in San Francisco. This has been a rough week for Uber as the CEO had to part ways with his family member, who were recently in a boating accident and fire their leading self-driver engineer, Anthony Levandowski, who’s the center of attraction of Waymo’s lawsuit.
