For years, Uber seemed unstoppable. The company bulldozed ahead of ride-hailing rivals through a mix of aggressive fundraising and smart strategies toward expansion in the United States and abroad. Along the way, Uber destabilized the taxi industry, became the most valuable US startup and emerged as the darling of Silicon Valley.
It gave the first sign of how big its highly anticipated initial public offering might be, telling some investors that it’s stock sale might value it at up to $100 billion a quotation below $120 billion valuations that had been floated by investment bankers. A revelation that follows its main competitor’s IPO last month whose shares have since dropped more than 15 percent from their offering price.
Uber is reportedly making its stocks publicly available tomorrow, according to Reuters. The IPO paperwork revealed that Uber will sell around $10 billion worth of stock. If true, Uber’s IPO would be one of the G.O.A.T. (greatest of all time) in the tech industry since Alibaba’s 2014 IPO. Today, Uber is expected to publish its public offering prospectus, giving investors a closer look into its businesses but withholding any information on the offering’s potential price, as it goes public tomorrow.
Its stock could be valued at $48 to $55 a share which would translate into a valuation of about $90 billion to $100 billion for the company, factoring in the roughly $10 billion that it expects to raise. At $90 billion to $100 billion, Uber would be valued above the $76 billion it was appraised at in its most recent fund-raising in August.
Although Uber’s debut is very much anticipated, the company remains unprofitable. The ride-hailing service has released some of its quarterly earnings figures publicly, even though it is a private company revealing that it lost $842 million in the fourth quarter of 2018 on revenue of $3 billion. Going public should take Uber to a point where it makes more money than it is losing.
