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In their race to win the ride-sharing wars, both Uber and Lyft have made promises to placate their shareholders. Lyft has sworn that while its spending big to gain market share—a strategy that brought the company 11 million rides in March, Bloomberg reports, compared to 7 million in October—it won’t burn through more than $50 million a month, or $600 million a year.
As for Uber, which completed 50 million rides last month, the company promised its employees and investors it would reach profitability in North America by the second quarter of 2016. Now it claims to have done so in the U.S. and Canada: Bloomberg reports that in February, Uber earned an average of 19 cents on every ride in the U.S. Twenty-five percent of every fare goes back to Uber, for things like marketing, software development, and customer support.
But Uber’s profitability is conditional. For one, its 19-cent profit per ride doesn’t include adjustments for interest, taxes, or allocations of employee stock, Bloomberg reports. For another, that figure only applies to the U.S. and Canada; in other markets, Uber is losing money hand over fist. In China, for example, Uber says it’s burning $1 billion a year to grow its market share—a strategy C.E.O. Travis Kalanick says is working. In China, Uber faces a rival in native ride-hailing company Didi Kuaidi, which launched a partnership with Lyft last year. Uber and Didi can’t agree on their respective market-share numbers; Kalanick has said that Uber accounts for between 30 and 35 percent of China’s private ride-hailing market; Didi Kuaidi claims it holds 83 percent. Uber has also promised to spend $1 billion in India to compete with Indian car-hailing service Ola. Globally, Uber—which is valued at as much as $62.5 billion—lost $1.7 billion in the first three quarters of 2015, Bloomberg reports.
Lyft, despite its underdog status, has fewer obstacles to overcome. The 4-year-old start-up operates solely in the U.S., where its only major competitor for market share is Uber. (For a time there seemed to be a slew of other on-demand ride-hailing services, but most have fallen by the wayside as the industry has evolved into a duopoly.) Lyft’s subsidies are necessary both to convince drivers to try their service as well as to draw in first-time customers. Now that Uber is the incumbent, and focusing on profitability in the U.S. while it shifts resources to overseas growth, Lyft is spending big to increase its own footprint domestically.
