WeWork’s I.P.O. filing shows huge growth (and losses)

The real estate firm that leases shared office space set in motion its process of going public yesterday by filing a financial prospectus with regulators. Here’s what to make of it, courtesy of David Gelles and Erin Griffith of the NYT.

It’s burning money at a high rate. WeWork lost more than $1.6 billion last year on $1.8 billion in revenue. (Compare that to Uber, which is frequently criticized along similar lines: It lost $1.8 billion last year on revenue of $11.3 billion.) WeWork lost almost $900 million in 2017 and more than $400 million in 2016.

But its growth is impressive. WeWork said it had more than 604,000 workstations around the world, used by more than 527,000 “members.” Both figures were roughly double what they were a year ago. Its revenue doubled in 2018 compared with 2017.

“To justify its valuation, WeWork has tried to position itself as a tech company, promoting the efficiencies it can achieve as it gets bigger,” Mr. Gelles and Ms. Griffith write. (Investment by SoftBank last valued the company at $47 billion, which would make it the second-largest tech unicorn to go public this year, after Uber.)

Investors haven’t been impressed by huge losses in companies that have gone public this year, however. Zoom, which is profitable, and Pinterest, which is nearly so, have fared well after their I.P.O.s; Uber and Lyft, which continue to burn cash, have not.

“This company is a leap of faith,” Shira Ovide of Bloomberg Opinion writes. “Its ambition is ambitious even by unicorn standards. So are its growth, losses, potential conflicts of interest and financial gymnastics.”