Meta Platforms Inc, formerly known as Facebook Inc, released its first-quarter 2022 results on Wednesday, in which its metaverse-focused Reality Labs division posted heavy losses..
The division Reality Labs – formerly known as Facebook’s Oculus division – has been spending increasing sums of capital on developing VR and metaverse-related products, posting a $2.9 billion loss in the first quarter of 2022.. That’s 61% more than its $1.8 billion loss in the first quarter of 2021.
Reality Labs’ overall revenue exceeded expectations, earning $695 million in revenue during the first quarter of this year by sales of things like virtual reality (VR) headsets and Meta Portal hardware.
At Wednesday’s earnings call, the CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg said losses in this division were to be expected, as Reality Labs is still largely focused on research and development of a number of software and hardware products such as Project Cambria..
“I recognize that it is expensive to build this, it is something that has never been built before. And it’s a new paradigm for computing and social connectionZuckerberg said.
“We expect to be significantly better at monetization than others in the space, and we expect that to become a sustainable advantage for our platforms as they develop.”
In financial reports from earlier this year, Reality Labs posted a loss of approximately $10 billion through 2021, of which about $4 billion was due to employee costs and research and development.
Overall, the company’s total revenue for the first quarter of 2022 is $27.9 billion, 6.9% more than the USD 26,100 million of the first quarter of last year. Meta’s quarterly report was well received by the market, and Meta stock price is up 18% in after-trade at the time of writing.
Continuing with the growth trend, the Meta’s number of employees increased 28% year over year, with 77,805 employees as of March 31.
In February, Meta suffered the largest daily crash in stock market history, losing $251 billion of the company’s market capitalization. The crash came after the number of daily active users fell by approximately one million.
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