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.
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Meta continues to sink billions of {dollars} 1 / 4 into growing the metaverse, and is simply now dealing with its first actual aggressive risk from Apple.
In its fourth-quarter earnings report Thursday, Meta stated its Reality Labs unit recorded an working loss within the interval of $4.65 billion. Analysts had been anticipating a lack of $4.26 billion, in response to StreetAccount.
The metaverse division has now misplaced greater than $42 billion for the reason that finish of 2020, the primary quarter for which numbers can be found publicly. The fourth-quarter loss was its largest but.
“We expect operating losses to increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and our investments to further scale our ecosystem,” the corporate stated in its earnings assertion.
Revenue inside Reality Labs was greater than $1 billion within the fourth quarter, up from $727 million in the identical interval a 12 months 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 referred to as the “next frontier” and the “successor to the mobile internet.” The present centerpiece for the enterprise is the Quest household 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 Friday and can price $3,500, considerably greater than Meta’s Quest 3 VR headset, which has a beginning worth 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 response to analysis agency Circana. An analyst at Circana instructed CNBC that the steep drop was probably attributable to an absence of latest stand-alone VR headsets.
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