Despite significant losses in its metaverse division, Meta reported strong Q2 2023 results – with the company earning $32 billion in revenue.
The same quarter has $3.7 billion spending on metaverse-related projects, which saw a mere $276 million in revenue. The company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said they’re still optimistic about their metaverse plans and reiterated that spending on this will continue to grow in the coming months.
Meta Q2 2023 Earnings Report
If there’s any billionaire who’s more mad than Elon Musk, it should be Mark Zuckerberg. The Meta CEO is spending billions of dollars in metaverse-related projects, only to see millions in revenue. Though he had long been saying that it’s a long-term bet, there are hints of fruits showing soon.
During the Q2 2023 earnings call, Meta’s Reality Labs – the division overseeing Meta’s virtual and augmented reality projects – recorded a loss of $3.7 billion! This is significant considering the revenue it generates – at just $276 million in the same quarter. Despite these numbers, Zuckerberg says he’s “fully committed to the metaverse vision.”
When asked for more details on the company’s metaverse spending, he pointed to the upcoming Quest 3 headset, scheduled to launch at its Connect event in September. Well, aside from losses in the metaverse, Meta is doing very well in the rest of the divisions, noting a $32 billion in revenue.
Zuckerberg boasts that Reels on Instagram and Facebook cater to 200 billion views daily, resulting from their renewed emphasis on AI-driven recommendations. He also highlighted the recent launch of the Threads app and the company’s Llama 2 large language model, which it shared with the public for free.
Though the early statistics of the Threads app reveal a declined user interest after its launch, Zuckerberg is confident about the app’s regaining interest over time, with the possibility of seeing hundreds of millions of users one day. Further, he talked about the mass layoffs Meta has been doing since late last year – about 20,000 job cuts – which have been “substantially completed.”
Zuckerberg previously dubbed 2023 as Meta’s “year of efficiency”, and cutting staff is just one tactic among them. Streamlining the company’s management structure, he pointed at Threads management- led by a relatively small team, to show as an efficiency example.
