Investors reduced Uber's financial valuation by $ 18.5 billion after a series of scandals and hacker attacks
According to Reuters and TechCrunch , the Japanese SoftBank corporation offers Uber to acquire a stake in the company. Previously, Uber was estimated at $ 68.5 billion, but under the new agreement, SoftBank plans to purchase shares at a discount of 30%, that is, according to 2015 estimates, about $ 50 billion. The reason for the discount is a series of scandals around Uber, which led to the co-founder and CEO of the project Travis Kalanika.
During the new round of investments, Uber employees and current shareholders, owning at least 10 thousand shares of the company, will be able to sell the shares.
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2017 turned out to be very difficult for Uber. Powerful scandals flared up around the company. Below is a short list.
Throughout the year, drivers actively expressed their dissatisfaction with the company's policies in many countries where Uber was present. For example, back in January 2017, the San Francisco court awarded the company a $ 20 million fine - the judge found that in two dozen US cities, Uber was misleading future drivers about future earnings. In February, one of the drivers of Uber Black personally expressed his claims to the company's founder, Travis Kalanika. The entrepreneur argued with him and accused of failing to take responsibility for his life. After the record of the dispute hit the Internet, a scandal arose and Kalanik was forced to apologize.
In March 2017, The New York Times reported that since 2014, Uber has had a specialized Greyball program - with its help, the taxi service deceived the authorities and the police in cities where its work was officially banned.
The secret application tracked travel orders from officials and police officers and replaced real cars on the map with “ghost cars” or hid all available cars. The application was agreed with the lawyers of the company.
In addition, in April, a driver of a competing Uber Lyft service also sued the company, accusing it of using a program to track the actions of competitors Hell. It is assumed that this software created fake Lyft user profiles in order to track the position of competitors' cars, and also monitored those drivers who worked for both services.
Not only drivers filed a lawsuit against Uber - on February 23, 2017, the company, which is part of the Alphabet development company Waymo unmanned vehicles, filed a lawsuit against the company . The company has accused former employee Anthony Lewandowski of stealing confidential data, including a description of the technology for measuring the range of vehicle objects, the lidar.
Later, Lewandowski created his startup Otto, which was bought by Uber. In the Waymo, Otto launch was considered a way to hide the dismissal’s original goal - moving to Uber, which also develops unmanned vehicles. The company denied the theft of technology, but first Lewandowski was removed from the creation of lidars, but then completely fired. At the same time, it was decided to abandon the use of the Otto brand, ostensibly due to the claims of the Canadian Otto Motors.
Another powerful wave of scandals, which eventually led to the resignation of Kalanik, was associated with complaints from employees of the company about harassment from colleagues and managers. On February 19, 2017, former employee Susan Fowler told about it in her blog, after which other former and current employees of Uber reported about similar cases.
As a result of Uber’s own investigation, in early June, more than 20 employees were fired due to sexual harassment charges against colleagues. The law firm Perkins Coie was involved in the investigation, which examined more than two hundred complaints.
Also in the winter of 2017, an investigation into the corporate culture of Uber was released in The New York. The material was based on interviews with 30 former and current employees of the company - they reported not only cases of harassment, but also general unhealthy conditions and internal corporate conflicts.
November 22, 2017 edition of Bloomberg told about the hacker attack on Uber. As a result of the incident, the attackers stole the data of 50 million passengers and drivers of the service. In addition, the criminals stole driving license numbers of about 600,000 American drivers. At the same time, in order to prevent further leakage, the company paid the hackers $ 100 thousand. And for several months it hid the fact of the leak.
According to Uber representatives, investors from SoftBank were notified of the attack and the leak in advance, even before the public disclosure of this information. However, this did not allow the company to maintain its own financial assessment at the level of the beginning of the year - too many scandals brought her 2017.
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/343494/
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