No, the Car Rental Companies Couldn’t Have Stopped Uber and Lyft

By admin_45 in IN THE NEWS

Excerpt from Barron's quoting DataTrek's Nick Colas:

.... "Sometimes companies with entrenched market positions miss out on major changes that threaten or even kill their businesses. Investors tend to sneer at the managers of those companies for missing their big opportunity.

But when it comes to Uber and Lyft’s impact on car rental companies, there was probably little that Hertz Global Holdings (HTZ) and Avis Budget Group(CAR) could have done, according to Datatrek co-founder Nicholas Colas.

Lyft, founded in 2012, plans to go public on Thursday at a value of more than $23 billion. Uber, which started in 2009, is planning to go public this year and reportedly looking for a valuation of as much as $120 billion.

These companies have not been grown in some secret lab. So then why didn’t the big car rental companies do anything to stop them? Colas doesn’t think that the companies could have done much to derail or co-opt these new rivals. The problem is that they didn’t have the kind of capital that the venture capital-funded firms can burn"....

Read the full article here in Barron's!