Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, demonstrates the Meta Quest Professional through the digital Meta Join occasion in New York on Oct. 11, 2022.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Photos
Meta continues to sink billions of {dollars} 1 / 4 into creating the metaverse, and is simply now dealing with its first actual aggressive menace from Apple.
In its fourth-quarter earnings report on Thursday, Meta stated its Actuality 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 over $42 billion because the finish of 2020, the primary quarter for which numbers can be found publicly. The fourth-quarter loss was its largest but.
“We anticipate working losses to extend meaningfully year-over-year resulting from our ongoing product improvement efforts in augmented actuality/digital actuality and our investments to additional scale our ecosystem,” the corporate stated in its earnings assertion.
Income inside Actuality Labs was over $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.
Actuality Labs develops the digital actuality and augmented actuality applied sciences underpinning the metaverse, which Fb founder Mark Zuckerberg has known as the “subsequent frontier” and the “successor to the cellular web.” 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 Imaginative and prescient Professional 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.
Gross 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 advised CNBC that the steep drop was doubtless resulting from an absence of recent stand-alone VR headsets.
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