Uber announced on Thursday that it lost a staggering $5.2 billion in the second quarter of 2019 in its biggest quarterly loss to date.
According to financial reports, the ride-sharing company reportedly paid $3.9 billion in stock-based compensation expenses to employees following Uber’s initial public offering in May, which contributed to the considerable loss.
But even without those payments, Uber still lost about $1.3 billion during the quarter, an increase of more than 50% of reported losses during the same period last year.
The company has diversified itself in recent years by investing in freight shipping, meal deliveries, and providing discounts for its ride-sharing services to lure consumers away from competitors such as Lyft.
But Uber’s revenue growth remains on a downward trend, and the company posted only a 14% revenue increase compared to the same quarter in 2018, its slowest hike to date.
“There’s the meme [going] around, which is, can Uber ever be profitable?” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said on a conference call with analysts Thursday. “I’ve certainly heard that meme, along with others.”
Khosrowshahi signaled the earnings report meant that his company was fixated on “healthy revenue growth.” The CEO emphasized that the ride-sharing and meal delivery services could possibly “be a spectacular business long-term.”
“We think that 2019 will be our peak investment year,” Khosrowshahi said in an interview with the New York Times. “We want to make sure that the kind of growth we have is healthy growth. The competitive environment, which got worse in the second half of last year, is progressively improving now.”
Uber revealed it was laying off 400 employees from its marketing team in the days before the earnings report was released in an effort to revamp its marketing department.
