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Meta in Q2 2023: Reality Labs Loses Billions of Dollars while Building Metaverse
Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ: META) has released its second-quarter revenue report. The company has generated as much as $32 billion in revenue, which marks an 11% increase year-over-year and a 12% growth year-over-year on a constant currency basis. The company also revealed the results of the performance of its Reality Labs in Q2 2023 which turned out to be rather disappointing.
Meanwhile, Meta has expanded its user base. In particular, the metaverse giant has seen as many as 3.07 billion family daily active people on average for June 2023, which is an increase of 7% year-over-year. The number of Facebook daily active users has also increased by 5% compared to last year to 2.06 billion people on average as of June 2023.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg commented:
“We had a good quarter. We continue to see strong engagement across our apps and we have the most exciting roadmap I’ve seen in a while with Llama 2, Threads, Reels, new AI products in the pipeline, and the launch of Quest 3 this fall.”
Reality Labs in Q2 2023
However, the revenue report has demonstrated not only growth but also some losses that Meta Platforms has suffered. The gross sales of the Reality Labs unit totaled $276 million, down from the $339 million reported in the first quarter. The numbers mark an almost 40% drop compared to Q2 2022 and are the lowest in two years of Reality Labs’ performance.
Besides, Reality Labs has also suffered $3.7 billion in operating loss during Q2 2023. Since the beginning of last year, its total losses have made up about $21.3 billion.
According to Meta, operating losses from the Reality Labs unit will “increase meaningfully year-over-year due to ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and investments to further scale the ecosystem.”
Currently, the tech giant is working on a few upcoming releases that it hopes will help recover its losses. In addition, it is planning to invest another $10 billion in the metaverse to reflect the company’s new vision.
Meta’s Recent Launches
In June, Meta launched a new service called Meta Quest+. For $7.99 a month, this subscription service brings users’ VR experience to a new level, allowing them to ‘browse less and play more’. The service is compatible with Quest 2 and Quest Pro headsets. Once the Quest 3 will launch this fall, Meta Quest+ will add support for it as well.
Further, Meta introduced a new AI music generator MusicGen that can create original songs from text inputs and existing melody prompts. MusicGen has been trained on 20,000 hours of music across different genres.
Earlier, Mark Zuckerberg also revealed a few details regarding the Quest 3 headset expected to launch later this year. The headset will be priced at $499, its design will make it more convenient for use compared to Quest 2. It will also comprise a next-generation Qualcomm chipset. Notably, Meta also partnered with Qualcomm Inc (NASDAQ: QCOM) to enable the running of Meta’s new language model Llama 2 on phones and PCs that are working on Qualcomm chips.
Meta in Q2 2023: Reality Labs Loses Billions of Dollars while Building Metaverse
