Investors are losing patience over Meta Plaforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg's enormous and experimental bets on his metaverse project.
patience over Meta Plaforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s enormous and experimental bets on his metaverse project that helped drive up the company’s overall costs by a fifth in the third quarter.
The Facebook parent said its overall expenses could rise as much as 16% next year and anticipates that operating losses at Reality Labs — the unit responsible for bringing the metaverse to life — “will grow significantly” next year.One Meta shareholder had recently voiced concerns, calling the company’s investments “super-sized and terrifying”. Analysts on Wednesday called them “confusing and confounding” and Meta’s inability to cut costs “extremely disturbing”.
In the July to September quarter, losses at Reality Labs ballooned to a whopping $3.67-billion from $2.63-billion a year earlier. Revenue nearly halved. “I know that sometimes when we ship a product … people say: ‘Hey, you’re spending all this money, and you’ve produced this thing,’ and I think that’s not really the right way to think about it.”“…We’re doing leading work that will become … eventually mature products at different cadences in different periods of time over the next five to 10 years.”