This is the ‘win with stories’ newsletter. Every week I send an email with a message wrapped in a short story. I also share one actionable tip and a recommendation to help you ****enhance your storytelling skills.
What’s bringing in the billions for Uber?
Ride hailing? Think again.
I read a note written by Jon Russell from The Ken a few months ago. These are some of the things it mentioned.
Uber holds 10% stake in Zomato through its sale of Uber Eats. It made over $624.6 million on its stake since Zomato went beyond its target public market valuation.
And that’s just the start.
Uber invested around US$700 million to build its South-East Asia business, and then sold it to Grab. What is Uber’s stake likely to be valued at when Grab lists in the US markets?
A cool US$6.6 billion.
Here’s another ace up Uber’s sleeve.
Uber owns 12% of Didi, the ride hailing leader in China. They had sold their business in the country to them. Didi went public earlier this year. It’s stake was valued at a whopping US$7.2 billion. After China’s crackdown on tech companies, the stock lost a lot of its value, but Uber’s stake in Didi is still the most valuable one in its portfolio at US$4 billion or so.
This total’s up to US$11.4 billion.
Now let’s look at Uber’s revenue from ride-hailing in APAC in the last three years.
US$3.7 billion.*
So that basically means…
Uber’s investments in APAC are close to triple its three year revenues from the region.
My lesson from this story: You can work to make money, but investing is that multiplies it.
*Info on Uber’s APAC revenues from Business of Apps website.
Communication tip for today:
My communication tip for today is ‘probe data for stories’.
Jon’s story looked at data pertaining to the value of Uber’s investments in Asia-Pacific. However, I wasn’t sure what message the article had for someone like me. That’s when I decided to check out the APAC revenues for Uber from ride hailing, and bingo! That’s when I realised that Uber’s investments were valued at a lot more than its revenues.
The message was clear: investment is a much bigger leverage than earning. So invest what you earn.
More often than not, we present data as is. Yes, sometimes we use data visualisation in presentations(think graphs, pie charts et al). But data is a helpful with insight, and powerful with stories. And to get to that you need to probe data for stories. The technique I used can be called ‘contrast’, where I pitted investment data of Uber against its revenue data.
There are many more techniques to do this. If you’d like to know, reply to this email and I will try sharing tips in the upcoming editions.
One thing you could watch today:
You could watch this talk on data storytelling by Ben Wellington and understand how he saved New Yorkers thousands of dollars in parking penalties. There are quite a few lessons in data storytelling if you watch closely. This is the link to the talk.
That’s it from me today. Hope you enjoyed this edition of ‘Win with Stories’ newsletter.
One last request – forward this to friends and colleagues who’d find this story and the tips useful. If you received this email from someone and liked it, you can subscribe here.
