Uber Goes to Vancouver

Uber listed on the new York Stock Exchange back in May last year. It traded at around $42 on its first day as a public company, and we bought them at that level for a group of risk-tolerant clients.

After that, things did not go so well. If you did not get the call to buy some, you might consider yourself to be lucky? Lots of pent-up insider selling and muted results pushed the stock down to a low of $25.58 in November 2019. In particular, disgraced founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick sold his entire stake, worth over $2.5 billion. Goldman Sachs sold all of the stock that they held for clients in venture funds (in other words bought at lower prices long before the listing).

I'm very confident that Uber is here to stay. The business model combines the power of the GPS mapping mobile phone app, the seamless payment backend and the flexibility of opportunity for its drivers. Even mature people find it easy to use. In future, ride-sharing will be much more common than vehicle ownership. The future is all-electric, driverless mobility-on-demand!

In news out yesterday, Uber said that after eight exhausting years of lobbying they finally got a licence to begin operations in Vancouver, which is Canada's third-biggest city. As usual it was pathetic local authorities and regional regulators keeping them at bay. This happens in lots of places, where cities sell medallions or rank spaces to mafia-style metered cab operators. It's never the customers who want to protect those old goons. The customers want Uber.



In recalcitrant cities like Cape Town, Uber tends to start anyway, pay the fines and wait for users to put pressure on the idiot city councillors or transportation board members to concede defeat. I guess that the regulators in a place like Vancouver were bigger slime bags than usual? Someone even made a rap music video about it:

I'm happy to say that Uber stock seems to be on the mend, hitting $37.40 last night on its way back to par. I said to Ted Weisberg (our partner and service provider at Seaport Securities in New York) yesterday that Uber was "back from the dead" and he scolded me, saying Uber is still too young and fresh to be described that way. Fair enough. Anyway, I think that it's a good buy at these levels.