A Crash Course for Uber. Dispatches from a Transportation Industry Analyst | Hubert Horan
Hidden Forces
Demetri Kofinas
4.8 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 30 June 2017
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this Market Forces segment of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with transportation industry veteran and analyst, Hubert Horan. Demetri and Hubert's discussion centers on the ridesharing company Uber, which has received a great deal of negative press in recent months. Stories detailing a culture of intimidation at the company continue to surface. Uber has developed a reputation for using heavy-handed tactics when dealing with the press and local governments, and the behavior of its CEO Travis Kalanick has come severely into question.
With roughly $7 billion of cash on hand, along with an untapped $2.3 billion credit facility, Uber may not have the financing available to survive more than 2 years without raising additional capital or selling part or all of its remaining assets. As Demetri Kofinas has said in a prior discussion with Evan Lorenz of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, "This could be the biggest financial blow-up in the history of private placements."
Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor: Stylianos Nicolaou
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So, Mr. Hubert Horan, thank you so much for coming on the program. |
| 0:03.1 | Happy to be here. |
| 0:04.1 | So I want to let our audience know you are a 30-year veteran of the aviation and transportation industry, and I actually came across your work. Though you've been writing about Uber for, is it, for the past two years now? Yes, it's been for the last couple of years. Well, there's a lot of stuff of yours online. A lot of that stuff gets posted on naked capitalism, but what I've seen, it goes back to 2015, correct? |
| 0:25.9 | Correct. |
| 0:26.6 | All right. So Uber has been very much in the news, and I'm sure as a result of that, your stuff is getting picked up a lot. There's a great deal of interest. Because when you were writing, I also assumed that it was largely in obscurity. |
| 0:39.1 | There was a sort of a large cult of excitement around Uber. I must say I was part of that in |
| 0:45.4 | terms of being a customer. I really have taken a delight in the platform, though I must say I found it |
| 0:52.2 | increasingly less satisfying as the years went on. In particular, |
| 0:56.8 | after it got cheaper, to be honest, I preferred it when it was a little bit more expensive because |
| 1:00.2 | I felt like the drivers or anyone else were more satisfied. But a lot has happened in the last |
| 1:05.4 | few months. On February 19th, Susan Fowler, who is a former Uber engineer, posted about sexual harassment by |
| 1:12.4 | Uber executives, which prompted an internal investigation where Uber hired the law firm |
| 1:19.1 | of Covington and Burling, which is Eric Holder's company, to come in. That, along with a number |
| 1:24.5 | of other issues, I mean, Travis Kalinick, the CEO of Uber, has had |
| 1:28.9 | longstanding, long-running issues for years, ever since he came on board as CEO. He announced |
| 1:34.9 | his resignation in June 13th of the company announced it, along with the resignation of M.O. Michael, |
| 1:41.1 | an SVP, and a very close confidant of his. In general, there's turmoil at the |
| 1:46.2 | company. You have done a really the best job, certainly that I've seen, it seems just a really |
| 1:51.1 | fantastic job, of delving into the numbers with Uber, besides also offering a great amount of opinion |
| 1:58.2 | with respect to what the issues are surrounding its business |
| 2:01.5 | model, its practices, et cetera. |
| 2:04.3 | And that's what I would really like to focus on today with you, sort of your work. |
... |
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