Is it too soon for an Uber IPO? Serepisos’ mum’s house up for sale
to return to unprofitability this year.
When Uber filed its listing papers last week it sought to defend this history of negative profitability by noting that Amazon failed to make profit for its first 17 quarters (4.25 years).
This is absolutely true. However, the total scale of the loss across those 17 quarters was US$2.8b – which is roughly the same as what Uber lost across one year in 2015. Meanwhile, these days Amazon is posting yearly profits of over US$10b.
The Uber IPO will reportedly value the ridesharing business at US$120b which is close to what Paypal floated at back in 2015. Now that’s a long way away from the trillion dollars Apple is valued at or the US$800b of Microsoft, but it’s within eyesight.
But there’s a fundamental
Serepisos said he was at the house because his mother was sick and he was looking after her.
He said he was aware the house was being advertised online, but was confident the debt would be repaid in time, stopping the sale.
In March 2018 General Finance won a battle against Terry Serepisos’ mother to claw back more than $250,000 it was owed in loan repayments.
General Finance sold Alliki Serepisos’ leaky Wellington apartment for $580,000 in May 2016 through a mortgagee sale, to recover costs from her loan defaults. But there was still money owing to General Finance.
At the time High Court Judge Rebecca Ellis said that Alliki Serepisos had borrowed nearly $500,000 and ‘‘made not one repayment under the loan’’.
Last year, General Finance went to the High Court seeking summary judgement to recover $295,000 from Alliki Serepisos over an unpaid loan secured by a mortgage it previously held over a penthouse apartment she owned, which Terry Serepisos, had been living in.
Associate Judge Warwick Smith ordered Alliki Serepisos to pay $50,000 and told General Finance it would have to go to trial to recover the outstanding amount.