BY RICHARD BEALES

WeWork’s revenue more than doubled in 2018 from a year earlier, to $1.8 billion. Yet its net loss widened marginally faster – and to an even larger $1.9 billion. The shared-office giant, recently rebranded as “The We Company,” is contemplating going public. Investors will have to square those figures with a $47 billion private valuation.

The vision of Masayoshi Son, whose SoftBank is a big backer of WeWork, is basically that throwing cash at market-leading disruptive companies allows them to supercharge their market share gains and therefore become even more valuable.

Though Son in January scaled back his most recent bet from initial expectations, it still involved injecting an extra $2 billion into the company. As a result, WeWork’s financial information, released on Monday, shows it is sitting on nearly $7 billion of committed cash. That will pay for the buildout and marketing of a lot of new locations.

That said, even initial-public-offering candidates in WeWork’s fast-growing, money-losing demographic tend to want to show losses narrowing relative to sales, moving in the general direction of profitability. Ride-hailing app Lyft, for example, due to debut as a public company on Friday, reported a loss equal to 42 percent of its $2.2 billion revenue in 2018 – an improvement on a negative 65 percent net margin in 2017.

WeWork boss Adam Neumann is instead keeping the growth hammer down. In one nod to investor sensitivities, though, he may be de-emphasizing “community-adjusted EBITDA” – a WeWork metric that brought eye-rolls from commentators. The measure, which reflects steady-state gross profit excluding the company’s substantial marketing, overhead and growth-related costs, is now also referred to as “contribution,” a plainer and better understood term.

That alone won’t get investors comfortable with a valuation range starting at more than double the $23 billion top-of-the-range indication so far from Lyft, a company with similar revenue and 2017-18 growth rate – and far smaller losses.

Back in 2017 when WeWork was valued at $20 billion, Neumann told Forbes a co-working company worth that much didn’t exist: “Our valuation and size today are much more based on our energy and spirituality than it is on a multiple of revenue.” WeWork isn’t rushing to list. When it does, though, public-market investors are going to have to feel the spiritual energy, too.

First published March 26, 2019