Meta: VR department with nearly $14 billion loss in 2022
Meta’s virtual reality division continues to devour a lot of money: For 2022, the Facebook parent company announced an operating loss of 13.7 billion US dollars for Reality Labs. The Meta share itself, meanwhile, continues to rise despite the bad news.
Meta’s first full fiscal year, including the reorganization of VR division Reality Labs, has become a significant expense: As the company announced, the virtual reality division generated sales of $2.16 billion for 2022 (previous year; 2.27 billion) – the operating minus for the financial year, however, is a whopping 13.7 billion US dollars, of which 4.3 billion US dollars are attributable to the fourth quarter of 2022 alone. In the US, the VR headset market is expected to grow at 2 percent be slightly declining.
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According to Meta CFO Susan Li, these figures also include restructuring costs. In the course of this restructuring, Meta only made headlines in November 2022 after the company announced that it would cut more than 11,000 jobs. According to founder Mark Zuckerberg, 2023 will also be “a year of efficiency”: The group wants to become “stronger and more agile” in the future – this should be achieved by reducing further layers in the middle management level, which means that relevant decisions can be made more quickly.
However, Li reaffirmed the forecasts made last summer for the 2023 financial year: Meta therefore expects Reality Labs to incur even higher financial losses in the current year. However, according to Zuckerberg, these investments are of great importance for the long-term future.
After all: Meta itself was able to achieve better results with sales of almost 32.16 billion US dollars in the fourth quarter of 2022 than was originally forecast at 31.5 billion US dollars. In addition, the number of Facebook users increased slightly in the same period, according to the company, the network now has two billion daily active users. The exceeded expectations are rewarded accordingly on the US stock exchange: Within a few hours, the Meta share jumped almost 20 percent; the price was now just under 175 euros – but the Facebook group is still a long way from its all-time high.
Source: Meta
Reference-www.pcgameshardware.de