Tech Bubble?

"Shares of Snapchat parent company Snap sank on Monday (Mar 6) as euphoria that marked its public debut on Wall Street last week vanished like the service's ephemeral messages.”

The above quote from this Channel News Asia article made me wonder how other popular tech start-ups are faring financially. I did a bit of googling and found that for some of the big players, it’s not all rosy at the moment:

Uber’s losses for 2016 are estimated to be US$3 billion.

Rocket Internet who owns Zalora and other internet companies announced losses of US$682million for the first nine months of 2016.

Rakuten, Japan's largest e-commerce site shut down their Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia's marketplaces in March 2016, and also ceased operations in UK, Austria and Spain in June the same year.

Lazada lost $334 million in 2015, while Redmart’s  operating losses were US$21 million in the same period, before Alibaba became their knight in shining armour. 

Linkedin lost US$119 million in second quarter of 2016 alone, before it merged with Microsoft.

Of course, companies typically struggle to break-even in the first 3 to 5 years, so it may be early days yet for some of them (although Linkedin has been around for 14 years and has seen more profitable days).

Perhaps these technology companies are embracing the "Grow first, make money later" mantra.

Well, I hope they are right, otherwise, it’s starting to feel creepily like the Dotcom Bubble of 2000.