Meta (formerly Facebook) announced that its VR games, apps, and hardware business rose to $877 million in the fourth quarter, from $717 million a year earlier.
However, it said VR is an emerging investment, as the VR division lost $3.3 billion this quarter compared to the $2.09 billion loss announced in the fourth quarter of the previous year. Meta’s stock fell 23% to $247.25 per share. It should be noted that this decrease is a significant loss for the company, as its closing value is $898.5 billion.
Zuckerberg gave the following words in his speech:
“In October, we announced that “Meta” would be our new name and laid out our vision for the metaverse. When we shared our plans at Connect, I said this is not something we’re going to do on our own. The metaverse will be built by creators and developers, it will be interoperable, and it will touch many different parts of the economy. In the months since it’s been exciting to see lots of other companies share their own plans for the metaverse and how their experiences and products might show up too. And I look forward to partnering with many of them as we all work to bring this to life together.”
Overall, Meta’s other businesses like Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger get a lot of revenue and profits to fund their metaverse investment. Overall, Meta posted a net income of $15.9 billion for the fourth quarter ended December 31.
Meta’s CFO, David Wehner, said that he expects capital expenditures for 2022 to be in the $29 billion to $34 billion range.
Wehner gave the following words in his speech:
“Our planned capital expenditures are primarily driven by investments in data centers, servers, network infrastructure, and office facilities. As we discussed previously, this range reflects a significant increase in our artificial intelligence and machine learning investments, which will support a number of areas across our Family of Apps. While our Reality Labs products and services may require more infrastructure capacity in the future, they do not require substantial capacity today and, as a result, are not a significant driver of 2022 capital expenditures.”
In 2020, Reality Labs generated a net loss of $6.62 billion on full-year revenue of $1.14 billion. In 2019, the company had a loss of $4.5 billion on revenue of $501 million. This means revenues per quarter have increased. In 2021, Reality Labs lost $10.2 billion as the company ramped up investment in the metaverse.
Meta hired more than 3,700 employees in the fourth quarter, bringing 71,970 employees.
Zuckerberg made the following comments about VR hardware:
“On the hardware front, we’re seeing real traction with Quest 2. People have spent more than $1 billion on Quest store content, helping virtual reality developers grow and sustain their business. We had a strong holiday season and Oculus reached the top of the App Store for the first time on Christmas Day in the US. We’re working towards a release of a high-end virtual reality headset later this year and we continue to make progress developing Project Nazare, which is our first fully-augmented reality glasses.”
As for the Metaverse, Zuckerberg said Meta focuses on the core hardware and software needed to build an immersive, tangible internet that provides better digital social experiences than anything in existence today.
“As for software, Horizon is core to our metaverse vision. This is our social VR world-building experience that we recently opened to people in the US and Canada. And we’ve seen a number of talented creators build worlds like a recording studio where producers collaborate or a relaxing space to meditate. And this year, we plan to launch a version of Horizon on mobile too, that will bring early metaverse experiences to more surfaces beyond VR. So while the deepest and most immersive experience are going to be in virtual reality, you’re also going to be able to access the worlds from your Facebook or Instagram apps as well, and probably more over time. This will enable us to build even richer social experiences where you can connect with friends in the metaverse whether they’re in VR or not.”
