The taxi service start-up company Lyft has begun to hire IPO consulting firm, to do the final preparation for their public listing.
Lyft IPO
Lyft is seen more as a technology company than a taxi company. It is also known for automatic driving and shared travel. For these taxi service start-up companies, the valuation seems to always be very mysterious. Lyft’s valuation is only 7.5 billion dollar. But it does not matter, once Lyft successful listing is done, the taxi service company will earn according to public market standards. According to experts predictions, in the future people will no longer have a private car as a prerequisite for travel. More and more people will choose to travel using services to meet their travel needs. And more and more car manufacturers and parts suppliers choose to work with Lyft. For instance, for autopilot testing, Ford worked with them. The involvement of autopilot technology will significantly reduce the cost of travel, on the other hand will increase the cost of the vehicle itself, so more people will choose no longer to buy a car, and will only require access to services.
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According to the estimates of the automotive industry experts, the cost of driving a mile by car is 60 cents to $ 1, while the cost of using Lyft and the excellent service is $ 2.5 to $ 3 a mile. But after the replacement of drivers with artificial intelligence and electronic equipment, the cost will be reduced by one third. So the combination of shared travel and automatic driving, will subvert the entire traffic travel area, Lyft is in the center of this subversion. In the words of venture capitalist Evangelos Simoudis, Lyft’s listing will allow people to see if the next generation of mobile services is really disruptive as private investors think. But after all, the robot for us driving the road that day will not come immediately, the real unmanned automatic taxi also need to wait for several years. Jeff Schuster, senior vice president of LMC Automotive, an automotive industry research firm, believes that Lyft’s IPO is just a small step towards a long journey to autopilot.
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Compared to the superior ambitions, Lyft will not put too much money and energy on their own engaged in automatic driving technology research and development, but as a test platform. Its partner list includes Ford, Tata, Jaguar Land Rover , Generic and Waymo, Drive.ai, and nuTonomy.
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Mike Ramsey, director of research at Gartner, a market research firm, agrees with Lyft that he believes it is advisable to work with as many technology companies as possible. But even so, automatic driving in order to really create a profit, will have to wait at least ten years.
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But it does not matter, as long as investors with a long term vision consider buying shares of Lyft, it will keep making money and investing it.
