Meta's Reality Labs Lost $13.72 Billion in 2022

Despite the significant losses, the company believes that the Reality Labs division deserves ongoing and potentially increased investment and says that it remains its top priority.

Meta has released its final quarterly and full-year financial results for the fiscal year 2022. While the company's revenue exceeded analyst expectations, it has not fully recovered from the challenges of the past year. A major problem for Meta is the financial performance of its Reality Labs division, which has been incurring significant losses.

The company's metaverse-focused Reality Labs division recorded losses of $4.28 billion in the final quarter of 2022. This marks a new low for the struggling division, which has been repeatedly positioned as a key part of Meta's future. Over the course of the entire year, Reality Labs lost a total of $13.72 billion.

While Meta as a whole generated $32.1 billion in revenue across all departments and apps, the revenue generated by Reality Labs was only $727 million in the final months of 2022, which is a decrease of 17% compared to the same period in 2021.

Last year, the Facebook owner cut over 11,000 jobs as a cost-cutting measure made in response to the "macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss."

As reported by Decrypt, during a quarterly earnings call on Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the upcoming fiscal year as a "year of efficiency," emphasizing that the company would continue to operate with minimal resources even after the layoffs. One example of cost-cutting measures that Zuckerberg mentioned is that Meta is "going to be more proactive about cutting projects that aren’t performing."

He, however, also repeatedly emphasized that Reality Labs was not facing cuts, but instead deserved ongoing and potentially increased investment.

"Our priorities haven’t changed," he said. "The two major technological waves driving our roadmap are AI today, and, over the longer term, the metaverse."

You can find Meta's financial report here. Also, don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platformour Reddit page, and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.

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Comments 2

  • Kessler Ana

    Hello! We have fixed the mistake in the article's title. If you have any further comments or suggestions, please, contact our Support team at support@80.lv

    0

    Kessler Ana

    ·a year ago·
  • Anonymous user

    Just false. Reality Labs is not Meta's VR division, that's just missleading.
    Besides all things VR, that division handles all AR initiatives -incl. AR hardware, all research initiative, which can include any number of things, and, as of mid 2022, also AI initiatives.
    Sure, it would have helped if Meta would break down these numbers but you can't blame them for being less transparent with R&D costs.
    The title is almost as missleading as earlier ones claiming Meta put billions into Horizon Worlds 🙄

    0

    Anonymous user

    ·a year ago·

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