Meta Reality Labs Posted $2.9B Loss, Zuckerberg Remains Optimistic

Meta Reality labs posted a $2.9 billion loss as per the reports from the Q1 earnings call but Zuckerberg remains optimistic about the future profitability of the Metaverse so let’s read more about it in today’s cryptocurrency news.

Meta Platforms Inc known as Facebook Inc posted the Q1 2022 earnings with the Metaverse-focused Reality labs division posting major losses. The Meta Reality Labs division spent increasing sums of capital on developing metaverse products but posted a $2.9 billion loss which is 61% more than the $1.8 billion loss in the first quarter of 2021. Overall Reality Lab’s revenue came in above the expectations and saw $695 million in revenue during the first quarter of the year from the sales of things such as virtual reality headsets and Meta Portal hardware.

In the earning call, the Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the losses n the division are to be expected owing to the fact that Reality Labs is still focused on research and development for the series of software and hardware products like Project Cambria:

“I recognize it’s expensive to build this, it’s something that’s never been built before. And it’s a new paradigm for computing and social connection. We expect to be meaningfully better at monetization than others in the space, and we expect that should become a sustainable advantage for our platforms as they develop.”

In the reports from earlier this year, Reality Labs posted a $10 billion loss in 2021 with $4 billion of those losses owing to employee costs and research as well as development. Overall the company’s total revenue for Q1 2022 is $27.9 billion or 6.9% from $26.1 billion during the first quarter of last year and Meta’s reports show that the stock prices are up by 18% in after-hours trading as of the time of writing. Continuing the growth trend, Meta’s overall employee count surged 28% to 77,805 employees. Meta suffered the biggest daily crash in stock market history at $251 billion which was wiped from the company’s market cap which came in the wake of a number of daily active users dropping by 1 million.

As recently reported, The social media giant Facebook’s Meta company will open a retail store in a physical metaverse store in San Francisco offering hardware for virtual reality space. In a Monday announcement, Meta said it will open up a retail store in Burlingame California and will provide interactive demos for the company’s hardware products like virtual reality headsets, smart glasses, and video communications displays. The store will be located on the Meta campus and will feature a wall-to-wall LED screen that displays what the users can see using Meta headsets.