May never see profitability

As a consumer, it is hard not to love Uber, largely due to the astonishing generosity of its investors who keep on chucking in the cash that allows the company to dish out super-convenient rides below cost. No wonder the punters are flocking to use the service in all 700 cities where the company operates. No longer in London, for instance, do you have to suffer a black cab driven by a Millwall supporter who will criticise Jacob Rees-mogg for being a bit left-wing, and this has to be a step forward for humanity.

Nor can you fault the company for its honesty, revealing in its IPO filing that it lost a perky $6.8bn from 2014 to 2018, and admitting the somewhat alarming concept for lovers of the traditional business model that it may never “achieve profitability”. Chuck in some criminal inquiries from the US department of justice, regulatory issues in many of its major markets, issues with sexual assaults, the backlash of the #Deleteuber campaign and the potentially catastrophic impact of its drivers being classified as employees rather than independent contractors, and you can see that this is a business with real issues.

Yet the price tag that is being mooted for this beauty when it hits its IPO is somewhere around the $100bn mark.

Dara Khosrowshahi, who was brought in to replace founder Travis Kalanick when the company urgently realised it needed a grown-up at the wheel, suggests that the growth potential lies in the fact that Uber currently has less than 1% of all miles driven globally. But the valuation remains one for the true believers.