Meta Reality Labs: Meta’s metaverse bet continues to bleed billions of dollars

It was in October 2021 when Facebook announced that going forward the company will be known as Meta. The name change wasn’t the only big announcement as the company signalled its intentions of making metaverse a reality — a world powered by augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality. Since then the going has been anything but easy. During its quarterly earnings call, Meta revealed that since the start of last year Reality Labs — the division dealing with Metaverse — has been losing quite a bit of money.

As per Meta, the operating loss from Reality Labs in the quarter was $3.7 billion. A quarter ago, this number was $3.99 billion. In entire 2022, the losses from Reality Labs were in excess of $13 billion. In the last year, Reality Labs has lost more than $21 billion.

What Meta has to say

According to the company, the losses aren’t unexpected or surprising. In the earnings report, Meta said that operating losses from Reality Labs unit will “increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and investments to further scale our ecosystem.”
The Reality Labs unit raked in $276.1 million in sales. Meta had launched the Meta Quest 3 headset in June.
Metaverse still remains in its infancy and it’s not clear how the concept will evolve in the coming years. Meta has made a significant bet and despite murmurs of backing down, the company seems fully invested in it. When Meta announced thousands of job cuts earlier this year, speculation was rife about Reality Labs being hit the worst. However, the company issued a statement saying that it remains committed to its ambitious metaverse plans. The losses in the last 12 months haven’t deterred the company at all, even though it expects to bleed money year-over-year.