Marcelo Claure: WeWork’s future is bright

Marcelo Claure, the executive chairman of commercial real estate company WeWork and CEO of SoftBank Group Corp.’s global arm, SoftBank Group International, has said that two years ago, the value of WeWork was zero, but now it is $9 billion and the future is bright.

Claure was responding to a question by CNBC anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin on “Squawk Box” Thursday.

WeWork was about to go bankrupt and it had run out of cash just a couple of years ago, said Claure, according to the interview’s unofficial transcript US and Global News received from NBCUniversal, CNBC’s owner.

“…the fact that we’ve taken from zero to evaluation circa $8, $9 billion in two years is great,” he said. “Now, the future is bright like Sandeep had said.”

Sandeep Mathrani, the CEO of WeWork, was also being simultaneously interviewed on the CNBC show.

To explain how successful the flexible shared workspaces-providing company has become, Marcelo Claure stated, “Second quarter, WeWork is less than 1% of all of London commercial real estate office space. We amount it for 37% of the leases so, that tells you that the future is bright, that tells you that people want a flexible workspace. People are using our all access cards to go.”

According to Claure, WeWork is doing well internationally as well.

“I visited WeWorks in Brazil this week full of people just testing different WeWorks so we feel extremely good,” he said.

WeWork went public on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “WE” also on Thursday. The company’s shares rose over 13% on the debut.

At the start of the interview, Sorkin said that “this is one of the great turnaround stories” because of the company almost facing bankruptcy in the past. The situation was so famously bad as late as January this year that Apple TV+ announced a new series called “WeCrashed” based on WeWork’s launch and fall, with Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway set to play lead roles.

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