New revenue figures show $50 billion Uber is losing a lot of money

By Maya Kosoff

Uber has traditionally been tight-lipped about its finances, but a new leaked document obtained by Gawker's Sam Biddle suggests the $50 billion company is wildly unprofitable.
That's not exactly surprising. And it certainly doesn't mean the company is in any grave danger. Many tech companies that raise a lot of money aren't profitable, and many go public while they're in the red. Just look at Amazon.

But the documents Biddle obtained, which seem to show Uber's profits and losses for 2012, 2013 and some of 2014, suggest the company loses tens of millions of dollars per year.

Uber's net revenue in the first and second quarters of 2013 was a combined $32 million, according to the document, and its numbers for the second half of the year were about $72 million, bringing its 2013 annual revenue to $104 million in total. In this case, Uber's net revenue is the amount the company keeps from each ride, not how much each ride actually costs with the driver's cut in it.

In the first and second quarters of 2014, the documents show Uber generating about $102 million, nearly as much as the entire year prior.

Gawker's documents also show that while the company's revenue has been growing quarter over quarter, its losses are also increasing. Its losses in 2012, according to Biddle, totaled $20.4 million. In the first half of 2013 the company lost more than $15 million.

A lot of the operational costs come from marketing, research and development, and administrative services.

Another internal Uber document obtained by Business Insider from early 2014 suggested that an annual run rate for Uber's top five markets (NYC, D.C., San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles) would generate about $1 billion a year for the company in 2014. Revenue estimates for Uber suggested Uber could generate $1.5 billion to $2 billion of gross revenue this year. There is no 2015 financial information in the documents Gawker obtained.

We've reached out to Uber for comment on this story and will update when we get a response.