On the 1st of February, after a rosier-than-expected quarterly earnings report, the share of Meta increased by more than 18% after-hours trading. But these huge rise spikes in Meta shares couldn’t lift the embattled metaverse division, which lost around $4.28 billion in 2022’s final quarter. This quarterly loss is a new low for the struggling metaverse-focused Reality Labs department. With this quarterly loss, the metaverse division’s total 2022 losses reached $13.72 billion, which is very high.
According to the Q4 report of 2022, the metaverse division earned only $727 million in revenue in the final months of 2022, marking a 17% decrease in revenue in the same period last year. Meta’s Reality Labs designs software and hardware for virtual and augmented reality experiences, such as the Horizon Worlds metaverse project and the Quest virtual reality headset.
However, despite these huge losses, the leadership of Metaverse was in relatively high spirits on its share rose on the 1st of February. As the virtual reality company beat overall forecasts for daily active users, monthly active users, revenue, and average revenue per user. Excluding Metaverse, Meta earned more than $32.1 billion in revenue across all departments and apps, overcoming revenue forecasts of $31.53 billion. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta framed the upcoming year on Wednesday’s earnings.
In November 2022, Meta laid off 11,000 employees, but according to Meta’s CEO, beyond those layoffs, it would remain scrappy. Mark said that they’re going to be more aggressive about cutting projects that aren’t performing. On the 1st of February, Mark made clear that Reality Labs was not on any chopping block, but instead a potentially increasing investment. Mark said that their priorities haven’t changed. Mark believes that two major technological waves are driving their roadmap, including AI and metaverse.
