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Logan Green, co-founder of US travel agency Lyft, is happy about a “great quarter”. “The second quarter was really outstanding,” said his CFO Brian Roberts. In fact, the Uber competitor managed to win back millions of passengers, more than double its quarterly revenue, and significantly reduce net losses. After years of burning money, the financial reserves have remained stable since the beginning of the year. The company arranges transportation in the United States and parts of Canada
The upswing should not be at the expense of the chauffeurs: “Drivers participate in this great performance with a record turnover per hour,” said Roberts on the occasion of the publication of the Lyfts financial results for the second quarter of 2021 until the end of June, “And in July driver sales remained strong.” Although coronavirus infections are rising again in North America, the demand for ride brokerage through Lyft has remained strong.
However, Lyft fails to provide specific information on the distributions to the chauffeurs. In July, a company spokesman said that motorists in “the best regions” are making more than $ 30 an hour, which is significantly more than before the coronavirus pandemic. At the time, Uber stated that half of US drivers received more than $ 32.33 an hour with the app active – so that includes times when chauffeurs are waiting for orders or are on their way to a passenger.
Advertising spending doubled
In the second quarter of 2021, Lyft had a turnover of 765 million US dollars, an increase of 125 percent compared to the second quarter of 2020 and of 26 percent compared to Lyft’s first quarter of 2021. This was made possible by doubling the number of passengers year-on-year to 17.1 million people. Compared to the first quarter of the year, this is an increase of 3.6 million people.
Doubling ad spend to around $ 100 million obviously helped. However, the pre-pandemic level has not yet been reached. In the fourth quarter of 2019 Lyft already had 22.9 million users.
Stock options save cash
At the same time, Lyft was able to cut its operating loss in half to $ 240 million – not least because Lyft abandoned the costly development of self-driving cars. Similarly, the development of net loss, which has fallen 43 percent to $ 251 million. That includes $ 201 million in stock options that do not affect cash balances but detract from existing stockholders’ ownership.
Lyft managed to have almost as much cash and readily available funds as of June 30th as it did at the beginning of the year ($ 2.2 billion). Add in prepaid benefits and Lyft has slightly more reserves ($ 2.6 billion) than six months ago. The good result surprised financial investors. After the announcement of the quarterly data, Lyft shares were initially traded up to 7.3 percent more expensive in after-hours trading. In the course of the evening, however, the price fell again, so that in the end there was only a small plus compared to the closing price on the regular trading day.
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