***SPAM*** Fortune: How Uber plays the tax shell game

[nettime's_superman]

< http://fortune.com/2015/10/22/uber-tax-shell/ >

How Uber plays the tax shell game

by BRIAN O'KEEFE, fortune.com

October 22 05:35 AM

The VCs were desperate to give him more money. It was the spring
of 2013, and Uber CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick was weeks
away from negotiating a new round of venture capital financing
that would multiply the valuation of his car-hailing startup by a
factor of 10 -- from a mere $330 million to $3.5 billion. The
line plotting Uber's growth was turning vertical, and the company
needed capital to match. But first Kalanick needed to do a little
planning. Tax planning, that is.

In May, Uber formed a new business entity in the Netherlands
called Uber International C.V. Over the next few weeks Kalanick's
San Francisco startup executed a flurry of transactions that
shifted ownership of several foreign subsidiaries to Uber
International C.V. and formed an agreement with the Dutch
business to split the profits from Uber's intellectual property.
By mid-June, Uber was ready to continue with its dizzying rise,
but with one critical difference: From that point on, nearly all
its ride-share income outside the U.S. would be effectively
shielded from U.S. taxes.

It was a crucial moment in the supercharged expansion of a
company that has become emblematic of the dynamic, thoroughly
modern global corporation -- the centerpiece of the platform
economy, the freelance economy, and a half-dozen other
epoch-defining monikers. The startup has become so important so
quickly that it's hard to see clearly.

What is Uber? Ask any 22-year-old waiting for a car on a street
corner in a fashionable neighborhood of Brooklyn or Chicago or
London or Shanghai, and he'll tell you that it's an essential
part of urban life -- an effortless ride home after a night out.
It's a status symbol, a utilitarian service, and a booming
business all wrapped into one.

Already a well-established part of our cultural conversation, its
name is regularly used as a verb -- "Let's Uber it." And it's the
representative ideal for a whole new class of company: the "Uber
of" phenomenon. Startups have been billed as the Uber of
everything from helicopters to laundry to fertility clinics to
parking. Perhaps no other company today inspires quite so much
devotion -- or anger. It's a vehicle on which people project
their own dreams and biases. The name -- which means "above" or
"over" in German -- is a fitting superlative to any beholder's
eye. Love it. Hate it. Uber becomes the Uber of that emotion.

At its core, Uber is an app, a seamless smartphone tool for
matching would-be riders with freelance drivers. It is also
perhaps the ultimate 21st-century corporation (for more about
what sets this breed apart see "Why every aspect of your business
is about to change"). Uber has become a global brand largely on
the strength of its intellectual property and without a need to
manufacture anything or maintain many fixed assets -- though it
now has more than 4,000 full-time employees. Moreover, it has
grown at a pace that has roiled a ubiquitous legacy industry
(taxis) and confounded government officials around the world --
with an approach, epitomized by the brash Kalanick, 39, that
comes across as all sharp elbows and legal gumption. "Stand by
your principles," the Uber CEO once said of his philosophy, "and
be comfortable with confrontation."


Just over five years after it began offering rides in San
Francisco, Uber now operates in 342 cities spread across more
than 60 countries. It's the poster child for the so-called
sharing economy, employing some 327,000 freelance drivers in the
U.S. and hundreds of thousands more around the world. And it is
the biggest of the "unicorns" (private tech startups with a
valuation of at least $1 billion) that have recently sprung up
all over Silicon Valley and beyond. In Uber's most recent round
of financing, investors assigned it a value of $51 billion -- a
milestone it reached faster than Facebook FB had before it. That
means it's worth more on paper (or on someone's paper, at least)
than, say, U.S. retail giant Target TGT , which had $74.5 billion
in sales in 2014 and has a market cap of just $47 billion.

Ask Uber's investors or the Wall Street investment bankers
clamoring to take it public and they'll tell you that it's
destined to be one of the world's most important companies and
that it will soon (perhaps in 12 to 18 months) be the market's
next marquee IPO. According to a recent report by Reuters, Uber
has told prospective investors that it will reach $10 billion in
global ride payments this year -- giving it $2 billion in revenue
when it takes its 20% cut. It projected those numbers, the
Reuters report says, to more than double in 2016.

Such figures speak to Uber's extraordinary growth trajectory,
which is clearly the company's focus now (as it is for virtually
all the unicorns). Its investors want it to keep grabbing market
share and not worry about generating profits. Those can come

Re: The Gentrification of Hacking: How yuppies hacked the

[Jaromil]

On October 21, 2015 5:47:57 PM GMT+02:00, Carsten Agger  
wrote:

>Ironically, the article you link to is behind a pay/login wall and I'm 
>asked to choose if I want to "enter with Google+" or "Enter with
>Facebook".
>
>Another example of the encroaching colonization of the Internet, I
>guess.

perhaps even deeper political encroaching
if we consider that is a self declared
" communist newspaper "
...more considerations on the gentrification
topic may follow.

however sorry for that link
it was open access before, I guess they
close only the archive behind registration.

the article is all in Italian lang BTW
the news did not travel beyond that

ciao


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