Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, demonstrates the Meta Quest Pro in the course of the digital Meta Connect occasion in New York on Oct. 11, 2022.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta continues to sink billions of {dollars} 1 / 4 into creating the metaverse, and is simply now dealing with its first actual aggressive risk from Apple.
In its fourth-quarter earnings report on Thursday, Meta stated its Reality Labs unit recorded an working loss within the interval of $4.65 billion. Analysts had been anticipating a loss of $4.26 billion, in accordance with StreetAccount.
The metaverse division has now misplaced over $42 billion because the finish of 2020, the primary quarter for which numbers can be found publicly. The fourth-quarter loss was its greatest but.
“We count on working losses to extend meaningfully year-over-year because of our ongoing product growth efforts in augmented actuality/digital actuality and our investments to additional scale our ecosystem,” the corporate stated in its earnings assertion.
Revenue inside Reality Labs was over $1 billion within the fourth quarter, up from $727 million in the identical interval a year earlier. Analysts polled by StreetAccount had been anticipating income of $768.2 million. Meta debuted its Quest 3 VR headset final fall.
Reality Labs develops the digital actuality and augmented actuality applied sciences underpinning the metaverse, which Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has called the “subsequent frontier” and the “successor to the cell web.” The present centerpiece for the enterprise is the Quest family of VR headsets.
As Meta pours cash into the metaverse, Apple is hitting the market with its first headset. Apple’s Vision Pro goes on sale on Friday and can price $3,500, considerably greater than Meta’s Quest 3 VR headset, which has a beginning value of $500.
Sales of VR and AR headsets and glasses dropped virtually 40% in 2023 to $664 million in 2023, as of Nov. 25, in accordance with research firm Circana. An analyst at Circana instructed CNBC that the steep drop was possible because of an absence of new stand-alone VR headsets.
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