Meta to Increase Spending on Metaverse despite Investors’ Concerns

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed his intention to continue spending billions of dollars on developing the metaverse despite investor concerns about the current state of his company's online advertising business.

In a meeting with analysts as part of Meta's third quarter earnings report, Zuckerberg and other Meta executives answered a series of questions from experts who were alarmed by the company's rising costs, which rose 19% year over year to $22.1 billion.

Meta's Reality Labs division, which is responsible for developing the virtual and augmented reality technologies that underpin the yet-to-be-created metaverse, lost $9.4 billion in 2022. The company's CFO Dave Wehner attributed this to declining sales of the Quest 2 headset. Going forward, however, Meta will only increase its infusion into Reality Labs:

We do anticipate that Reality Labs operating losses in 2023 will grow significantly year-over-year. Beyond 2023, we expect to pace Reality Labs investments such that we can achieve our goal of growing overall company operating income in the long run.

The head of the company said he could not give an exact answer on the scale of investment in the development of the metaverse. It is aimed at the longer term, but "that is going to end up working."

Meta faces a challenging macroeconomic environment, the impact of Apple's iOS privacy update in 2021, which has made it harder for Meta to target users with ads, and competition from players such as TikTok.

Zuckerberg acknowledged that his company is developing the Metaverse in order to own a platform in the future that will not be negatively impacted by the decisions of competitors such as Apple. In addition, the metaverse allows technology companies to be more innovative by creating new technological solutions: