Uber reported a record $5.2 billion loss on Thursday, while also posting record-low revenue growth.
The ride-sharing company’s second quarter figures showed the losses were due in large part to stock options the company paid employees following Uber’s initial public offering in May.
{mosads}But even when stripping out the stock awards, the company was down about $1.3 billion, more than twice the reported losses from the same period last year.
Revenue rose just 14 percent compared with the same quarter last year, the slowest pace on record.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said the earnings report was a sign that the company was focused on “healthy” revenue growth.
“We think that 2019 will be our peak investment year,” he said in an interview with The New York Times. “We want to make sure that the kind of growth we have is healthy growth.”
“The competitive environment, which got worse in the second half of last year, is progressively improving now,” he added.
Uber in late July announced it would lay off roughly 400 employees, including about one-third of its marketing department.
“We are not making these changes because Marketing has become less important to Uber,” Khosrowshahi said at the time in a staff email. “The exact opposite is true: we are making these changes because presenting a powerful, unified, and dynamic vision to the world has never been more important.”