Meta continues to lose billions of dollars due to emphasis on Metaverse.
Facebook Reality Labs (FRL), lost $13.7B on revenue of $2.2B in 2022.
Despite a stated shift in focus toward AI, Meta has not abandoned the metaverse. This was reaffirmed by Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg during an earnings call.
Zuckerberg stated:
“Our investments in AI continue. We remain fully committed to the Metaverse vision as well. We’ve been working on both of these two major priorities for many years in parallel now, and in many ways the two areas are overlapping and complementary.”
Ambitious Long-term Horizon
The social media behemoth continues to lose billions of dollars as a result of its emphasis on the metaverse. At Meta, the subsidiary in charge of the metaverse, known as Facebook Reality Labs (FRL), lost $13.7B on revenue of $2.2B in 2022, up from a loss of $10.2B on revenue of $2.3B in 2021.
The CEO added:
“This is an ambitious long-term horizon, multi-faceted roadmap. There are lots of components to the Reality Labs portfolio across VR, AR, Metaverse, social platforms, neural interfaces, and we really have a long-term time horizon for evaluating the return on our investments here.”
Meta’s latest financial report shows an increase in both net income and sales over the previous year’s second quarter, with net income at $7.79 billion (up from $6.7 billion) and revenue at $32 billion (up 11%).
There is still much hope that the metaverse will stimulate innovation and economic growth on a global scale. In order to reach its full potential, the metaverse ecosystem must remain open and accessible while still providing enough protection for users.
Both the Metaverse and AI are expected to revolutionize a variety of fields and increase the effectiveness of traditional processes, among other things.