blockworks.co
01 February 2024 23:33, UTC
Meta’s metaverse division is still raking in losses but managed to impress with revenue last quarter.
Reality Labs, the company’s metaverse-focused team, notched losses of roughly $4.6 billion, though the unit took in revenue of over $1 billion.
To put that figure into perspective, Reality Labs reported revenue of $727 million in the same period a year earlier.
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The company attributed the third-quarter revenue to sales of the Quest 3 — its newest virtual reality headset — during the holiday season.
For the 12-month period ending Dec. 31, the unit reported losses totaling $16.1 billion.
“We’ve made a lot of progress on our vision for advancing AI and the metaverse,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.
However, the company also warned in its earnings that it expects “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 stark warning isn’t new, with the company disclosing similar warnings in previous quarterly reports.
“We’ve invested heavily in both AI and the metaverse and will continue to do so,” Zuckerberg said on the Thursday earnings call.
The company reiterated last year that it will continue to focus on its metaverse vision. The company made its ambitions clear back in 2021 when it changed its name to Meta from Facebook.
In July of last year, the CEO warned that he “can’t guarantee” that he’s ”going to be right about this bet,” but that he believes it’s the direction the world is going in.
