Tuesday, August 20, 2019

By now any financial analyst worth his or her salt, or with lots of time on your hands because all the managing partners are on vacation, has seen news that WeWork has filed a registration statement to go public.

You might also have seen the big item in that registration statement: WeWork’s $33.95 billion in operating lease liabilities.

Sure, that’s a staggering amount of money — but how staggering, exactly? Calcbench decided to investigate.

We pulled up a list of all publicly traded firms and ranked them by operating lease liabilities. Just for kicks, we also included those companies’ revenue and operating income for the first half of 2019. See Figure 1, below.



The numbers pretty much say it all. Whenever WeWork goes public, it will have the largest operating lease liabilities of any public company, by far. Its two most important financial metrics, meanwhile, won’t be anywhere near close to what other firms with large operating lease liabilities generate.

So will WeWork be able to scale up operations to meet those future liabilities? Do the numbers above justify the valuation it’s seeking from investors? You tell us. At Calcbench we work hard (Ha! See what we did there?) to bring you the data, so you can make better decisions quickly and easily.

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