Meta's Reality Labs Posts $4.5 Billion Loss In Second Quarter 40
In the company's second-quarter earnings report on Wednesday, Meta's Reality Labs unit recorded an operating loss of $4.48 billion. CNBC reports: Since late 2020, the Reality Labs unit has generated cumulative losses of about $50 billion, underscoring CEO Mark Zuckerberg's massive investments into the hardware and software that underpins what he says will be the next era of personal computing. Revenue in Reality Labs, largely derived from the company's Quest family of VR headsets and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, came in at $353 million, representing growth of 28% from $276 million a year earlier. Analysts were expecting the unit to bring in $371 million.
50 billion losses (Score:4, Interesting)
373 million in income ain't gonna make a dent in that 50 billion where is the money coming from to support 50 BILLION losses?
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They launched too early. To Apple's credit, they do normally wait until they can do some slick demos before going to market. Zuckerberg was roundly mocked for spending $10 billion on this: https://www.pcgamer.com/mark-z... [pcgamer.com]
To make matters worse they lied about adding legs. In the demo they showed legs matching the user's movements, but in reality they just added a canned walking animation that looks kind of weird.
On top of all that, early reports from the metaverse suggested that it was full of paedophiles h
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They launched too early. To Apple's credit, they do normally wait until they can do some slick demos before going to market.
apple launched with fake demos too creating huge expectations that are still unmet. currently nobody knows what to do with that overpriced and overengineered piece of tech, last i checked their sales tanked fast after the hype evaporated and they ran out of whales in the us. tbf if they manage to get anyone to develop actual software for that thing they might have a niche in the future. that would indeed be incomparably better than zuckerberd's delusional fuckup, and "overpriced and overengineered" is their
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I very much doubt (although I have no evidence) this is an actual $50 Billion. Meta could use this to lower their "earnings" for tax purposes. There's nothing stopping them from sweeping every stupid money losing decision into this $50 Billion regardless of whether it involved Reality Labs.
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Do you think that there's something magic about "Reality Labs" from a tax standpoint that makes losses there tax-deductible in a way that's different from other parts of the larger company?
Re: 50 billion losses (Score:2)
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Being a subsidiary business, and as such one can play accounting games with parent funding their expenses in exchange for licensable technologies or manufactured goods. So, said losses can be transferred to the parent and realized elsewhere in the business where thereâ(TM)d otherwise be realized profits. The government also does tax incentives for R&D efforts in hopes of growing the overall economy, knowing that new efforts often take years to reach the market. But yeah, nothing about this specific subsidiary thatâ(TM)s unique, other than how much money Zuck allows it to suck up before angering shareholders.
I hope you don't actually work in a financial or accounting role in a public company. If you do, it sounds like the next Enron.
Re:50 billion losses (Score:4, Insightful)
50 BILLION Losses ? This is ridiculous. This is more losses than some industry sectors are worth.
Welcome to the world of ridiculous sizes. $50 billion sounds ridiculous but it really isn't. If you instead look at it in terms of R&D expenditure over 3 years as a percentage of overal company revenue it is actually on the low side.
That said the expectation would have been that they bring in some more revenue and reduce expenditure over time. This doesn't appear to be happening.
where is the money coming from to support 50 BILLION losses?
Meta generates more profit than that every year and don't have much in the way of other R&D in progress. Not only are they able to support far more of a loss than that in one division, they can do so while still returning profits to share holders.
It's just a situation where people don't understand big numbers. They need to be looked at in relation to other big numbers.
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R&D expenditure! Good grief, man. They didn't need to badly reinvent MMRPGs. For $50 billion, they could have picked up a right shiny working version.
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I know, that is the true WTF. Now admittedly they didn't blow $50bn on an MMORPG, they are doing some amazing things with hardware too, but a not insignificant portion was sunk into the Horizon failure which is truly baffling.
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Welcome to the world of ridiculous sizes. $50 billion sounds ridiculous but it really isn't.
Yeah. Elon Musk gets more than that as a pay bonus.
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50 billion losses? The share price was down a bit today, because everyone hoped it would be more like 100bn. The C-suite said to be looking into ways to get "bigger numbers" next quarter.
Crap jokes aside, there's no way to recoup the losses in future. There'll be another 50-100bn lost before anything 'killer' comes out of this, and by then there just won't be a way to monetise it enough to make that money back in anything like a sensible time frame. Still, if Zuck gives away some of his fortune to keep some
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I think it's very hasty to say "there won't be a way to monetize it".
In 2008 very few people would have thought you could take "watch how cute my cat is when he jumps off the window ledge" and "Checking in at the dentist getting my teeth cleaned" and "Sagittarius millennials be like..." and monetize your way into being one of the 10 wealthiest and most powerful companies on the planet.
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Exactly. The fact that we've seen plenty of everyday morons unironically walking around (and driving!) with Apple Vision Pros on shows that Mixed Reality is close to progressing past the early adopters phase.
Already less VR-ish and more AR-like lightweight wearable displays like the stuff from Xreal and RayNeo is hitting the market at affordable price points. It's a question whether Meta will succeed in making a VR/MR-device that can serve these everyday use cases well, but something along these lines is de
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Agreed.
I suspect full-immersion VR will suffer from uncanny valley and disembodied-disorientation effects for another generation. I don't think the technology itself is as big a problem as most people seem to think. I think the limitation isn't the VR tech in the console, it's the neocortex tech in the cranium. You need most of the population to have grown up with their brain development optimized for screen projections and haptic-feedback metaphors instead of the physical world. AR is the prerequisite to e
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where is the money coming from to support 50 BILLION losses?
How about persuading Elon Musk to buy it and pay off the debts? He can afford it, the amount matches his recent pay bonus from Tesla quite well. Hopefully the press conference on occasion of the sale will feature his fight with Zucherberg that we are still eagerly waiting for.
Just toys for moguls (Score:1)
Zuck plays with VR and Musk plays by turning X into his troll farm. They don't care much if they lose a few billion here and there. We be pawns.
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and Musk plays by turning X into his troll farm.
And his own personal censorship regime [newsweek.com].
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At least I'm not an Anonymous Coward :-P
Probably a decade or two too early (Score:3)
Re: Probably a decade or two too early (Score:2)
About the same time as fusion power... I mean ten years ago
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
Come on.
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I do agree that VR and AR can be useful, even now, but it's still in quite niche areas. Microsoft's HoloLens was a huge asset for clash detection on a complex construction project I worked on as you could see all the comms a
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a) Not certain.
b) Lets say in 100 years. Maybe. If the tech is ready by then. May also take longer.
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Certainly VR and all things virtual will be huge...in the future.
It's becoming increasingly obvious he pulled the trigger too early.
Maybe, they need to make sure they can sustain this pace for the next decade. Even if they're not the ones who figure out the big application, if it does hit they'll be in a great position to execute.
I actually like what they're doing. Most companies call it R&D when they add a new feature or make some incremental improvement to their current product. Meta is actually investing serious capital into creating an entire new sector.
Blocking his shtyle (Score:2)
They need to focus (Score:3)
The $50bn loss is largely from the failed metaverse bullshit. They should stick to what actually works and what people are interested in, playing games and using toys. For the expense in the headsets and AR environment they have delivered a lot.
For the expense in their abysmal Horizon metaverse platform I've never seen so much spent on so little for the benefit and interest of so few.
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No they shouldn't. Facebook needs to lose all their money and evaporate. Then they can spin off what few useful apps/tools they own and we'll be free from Facebook!
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Please leave your fantasy out of it. They haven't lost a cent. They've "spent" $50bn all the while continuing to turn $40bn/year in profit back to their shareholders. Facebook isn't losing any money.
Credit where it is due (Score:2)
Re: Credit where it is due (Score:2)
Will be more than 50 billion total by year end! (Score:4, Informative)
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Zuckerberg is not the genius he claims to be
Noe of the tech billionaires is. They all just got very lucky and we got unlucky.
wtf did they spend it on? (Score:2)
They certainly did not spend the $50b in developing the cheap-ass headset or content. There are companies that spent 100x or 1000x less and developed a better headset (two examples: Bigscreen Beyond, Varjo).
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They spent it where every big tech company spends it. In piloting Jira tickets and updating Confluence pages.
It's AGILE!!! All you need to do is release a MVP and un-impress everyone who was interested to the point they don't give a $hit anymore.
2016 we had AMAZBALLS graphics - Lone Echo, Asgards Wrath, etc. 2024 we have stupid mobile graphics, or a horrible lag to use Steam VR.
VR IS RUINED thanks to the Quest. It might be more available to the masses with mobile chips but it sucks. Inside out sucks. LCD