It seems that Lyft is smelling Uber's blood in the water, as many sharks, circle around Uber. Uber is trying to remain adrift amongst hundreds of lawsuits, regulatory and government investigations in the US and around the globe, and possibly not surviving to its expected IPO in 2019.
Lyft's mister nice guy routine might be changing phases especially since hey took their first step out of the US, not so far abroad, Canada, but it is their first international step to global expansion. Lyft succeeded in raising $1 billion from CapitalG, the investment arm of Alphabet and it is now trying to extend the round with a further $500 million.
Lyft leaked a document to Bloomberg that went on to claim that Lyft has boosted its US market share by 61% during 2017 and has reached close to a third of the market. These gains are directly attributed to the failures in Kalanick's handling of Uber affairs which are still being dealt with by his replacement. With all of Uber's problems and Lyfts advancements, Lyft will still maintain losses due to continual injections of capital into growth and app upgrades and will not reach break-even as originally projected.
With that being stated, the document is forecasting a break-even state next year, 2018 and claims that Lyfts earnings will rise to $500 million in 2019 and over $1 billion during 2020. However, Lyft has increased its spending ratio to take advantage of Uber's problems and the company will most probably only break even towards the end of 2018 and not during 2018.
During the last year, Lyft started to increase its scope around the US and now covers 95% of the population with over 500 million rides in the last year. Lyft has increased its investment in the driverless car division and recently got the California DMV permit for testing autonomous cars on state roads.