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

travis kalanick uber
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon

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.

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That's not totally 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 that Biddle obtained, which appear to show Uber's profits and losses for 2012, 2013, and some of 2014, suggest the company is losing a significant amount each year.

“Shock, horror, Uber makes a loss. This is hardly news and old news at that," Uber told Business Insider in a statement. "It’s the case of business 101: you raise money, you invest money, you grow (hopefully), you make a profit and that generates a return for investors."

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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.

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A lot of the operational costs come from marketing, research and development, and administrative services. The company has raised more than $6 billion from investors to compete in international markets, such as India and China, and to push new products like its carpooling service, Uber Pool.

Another internal Uber document obtained by Business Insider from early 2014 suggested that an annual run rate for Uber's top five markets — New York City, DC, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles — would generate about $1 billion a year for the company in 2014. And in some of those cities Uber is profitable.

Revenue estimates for Uber suggested Uber could generate $1.5 billion to $2 billion of net revenue this year. There is no 2015 financial information in the documents Gawker obtained, so the data is a bit out of date.

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