It's easy to compete with the company, but hard to compete with the VC money Uber pulls in. Uber's only competitive advantage is the $24b they were given to keep them alive.

If VCs keep funding Uber, Uber is unstoppable. But as soon as that money runs out, they're just another taxi company. Except they're a taxi company who loses $350 million dollars every month. That's not hard to compete against.

Or are they a taxi company that makes $100MM/month and spends $450MM on R&D that they could stop if they aspired to only be a taxi company?

(I think UBER is comically over-valued, but I also think their core business is probably quite profitable.)

"R&D" sounds grandiose but what meaning does it actually have in this context? I think that's the bet on autonomous cars? Problem is, they won't be the only one to have them, and not even among the first and best ones it seems. Nor is it clear how anything but complete autonomy could solve their problems. Actually, not even if that actually worked it's clear why Uber's Über-ambitious plans would work out. As far as I can tell that "R&D" money is just wasted - but I'm mainly saying this in order to hear counter-arguments, not because I know (I don't really)...

"R&D" typically includes software and application development, so it's probably not all wasted.

In this situation I don't think it really matters. If the VC money stopped, Uber would either go out of business or shrink back down to being a taxi company, in which case they have no competitive advantage and no network effects, making switching costs extremely low.

Being a more profitable taxi company doesn't mean much when most of your employees are also employees of your competitors, and most of your customers are also customers of your competitors. There's just no lock-in.

They're spending a lot of money on subsidizing rides still. More than on speculative R&D.

Uber is worldwide - I’ve used it on 4 continents. I actually signed up for it when in South Africa.

Considering they sold their business to Grab, I think you could safely say Uber+Grab are as close to a global service as you can get, and probably represents a significant fraction (though maybe not 50%+) of the global market

In NYC Via is making a big dent, and is actual ride sharing to boot.

Uber and Lyft are running huge deficits. Of course they can keep the competition at bay so long as they don't have to make money.

What about Europe?

india: ola