6 ms·

Meta's Reality Labs loses record $4.65B ahead of Apple's Vision Pro launch

38 points by taimurkazmi 3y ago

dpflan 3y ago
What is the breakdown for how this money is being used/spent? Understandably AR/VR is costly (hardware, software, etc), but I am wondering what percentage of this money is going to the AI research that can certainly help AR/VR but also be used in other contexts (as in the research allocated to AR/VR can be multi-purpose and not really a pure loss).
- dpflan 3y ago
  Actually, is Meta strategically using this for loss write-offs/tax evasion/tricky balance sheet mechanics/financial engineering? -- EDIT -- Thank you tomxor for entertaining a possible answer.
  - DidISayTooMuch 3y ago
    Oh yes, just burn all the money so they can use it as a tax write-off? Does anyone really know how these tax write-offs work? People just use the term without any clear understanding. Meta like any sane company out there will probably use every rule to avoid (not evade) paying tax. Thats good for the shareholders. But this isn't one such measure, it's mostly R&D expenditure.
    - tomxor 3y ago
      It works as a tax free investment. So long as it actually pays off in the future, they get to skip tax by putting it straight into R&D now instead of tomorrow. Another thing they did was sell hardware below cost, so the public kind of benefit - but at the same time FB potentially benefit by undercutting competition and gaining market share... One way of framing that last one might be "Deciding how their tax is spent so that it might benefit Facebook" - from that perspective it doesn't seem like a bad idea (purely from the business side, not public interest) to burn the tax yourself for a little more control.
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    You cant save money by losing money. Metas tax rate is 17%, write offs are still loses.
  - boeingUH60 3y ago
    Spoken like the average armchair accountant.
- tomxor 3y ago
  Yeah I'd like to know. The article keeps framing it as "The metaverse division" and "sink billions of dollars a quarter into developing the metaverse"... but Reality Labs (basically Oculus) doesn't just do stupid metaverse/horizon-blah, they make the actual Quest. So I expect a decent chunk of this was the cost of developing their two recent hardware upgrades. I believe they may be back to selling at or below cost again, so part of that loss could also be a strategic loss for future market share. If more of it actually went into the metaverse nonsense then that's truly abominable, but the article presents no evidence for this. It seems like all of the media still doesn't realise the Quest is primarily a gaming platform and horizon is just a stupid side project Zuckerberg has forced upon them, to everyone who actually uses them this framing just seems ridiculous.
  - wantsanagent 3y ago
    Since we're talking about billions of dollars here, I'd like to know how far down the production stack they are investing. The displays, optics, and processors in headsets are hungry for technological advances. So is Meta custom building meta-material grown silicon lenses (or other crazy sci fi stuff), or are they just trying to commercialize other peoples breakthroughs at the lowest levels?
    - RealityVoid 3y ago
      I suspect it's the latter, although I fail to even wrap my head around how the heck fundamental technological advances even happen. I mean you have people far removes from commercialization that pour a lot of time, money, knowledge and material into making this obscure little facet a tiiiny bit better. How do you even get to know what to improve, what needs improving, what _can_ be improved? How the heck do you even get funding for something so so very speculative?
oldpersonintx 3y ago
[dead]
DidISayTooMuch 3y ago
You gotta burn money to make money. This much cash burn is required to build the next gen level of infrastructure. Its a big bet for the company, let's see how it pays out. Haters going to say its all in vain, but no one knows how the future will look. Stock at ATH btw.
- dpflan 3y ago
  > "Note: Meta began reporting Reality Labs as its own segment in Q4 2020." RL has been burning money for a few years and similar rates, and this just happens to be the highest one at the moment. Q4 seems to always stand out as the largest loss each year. (According to the "Quarterly losses for Meta's Reality Labs" chart in the article).
jug 3y ago
> The metaverse division has now lost more than $42 billion since the end of 2020 I can't help but think of how this cash could have been spent on something that benefited everyone (in the dire covid/postcovid years no less) rather than the world's most expensive trial on whether people would rather meet in a MMO world than with their web cameras in a meeting app. Makes Star Citizen's $0.7B crowdfunding look cheap.
- quest88 3y ago
  I share your sentiments, but realistically how would one implement that? The US (where meta is based) government (ie, the people) can't agree what benefits everyone. The positive side is all of the jobs it paid for.
  - LesZedCB 3y ago
    not allow private companies to accumulate so much capital by breaking them up and taxing them fairly. then use the budget for things like single payer healthcare and affordable housing
    - quest88 3y ago
      Well, again, the US citizens can't agree to that. So then what?
      - LesZedCB 3y ago
        increasing wealth inequality and unaccountable mega corporations. more of the same, basically. I don't "believe" there is a solution until enough people get really hungry.
    - boeingUH60 3y ago
      The US government already has enough money for these things. They refuse to do it because the citizenry isn’t in support..
  - slimrec77 3y ago
Simon_ORourke 3y ago
The stench of doom emanating from Meta is starting to become over-powering. An out of touch CEO surrounded by yes men, who won't let him know the emperor has no clothes.
- mateo411 3y ago
  Yes, with a low market cap of 1.22 Trillion and the stock price is up over 20% today. The end is near indeed!
- dboreham 3y ago
  Meanwhile, stock is up 20% today..
  - SteveNuts 3y ago
    Stock buybacks and announcing a new dividend will definitely do that on its own.
    - HDThoreaun 3y ago
      Metas buybacks are nothing new. The dividend pales in comparison to the buybacks. The dividend is $5 billion a year which is the amount theyve been buying back every quarter recently.
spogbiper 3y ago
Meanwhile "Meta shares jump after profit triples and company announces first-ever dividend", also from CNBC https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/01/meta-earnings-q4-2024.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/01/meta-earnings-q4-2024.html
criddell 3y ago
How does the Apple launch tie into Meta's loss? Is the implication that the losses are going to deepen now that Apple's device is out?
- neogodless 3y ago
  The last paragraph is maybe the only relevant one: > Sales of VR and AR headsets and glasses dropped almost 40% in 2023 to $664 million in 2023, as of Nov. 25, according to research firm Circana. An analyst at Circana told CNBC that the steep drop was likely due to a lack of new stand-alone VR headsets. You can read that either way though... sales are dropping, but maybe only because there wasn't anything new, so maybe they'll rebound. Beyond that, it's speculation. Meta is throwing money at the idea, and expects to throw even more at the idea. > “We expect operating losses to increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and our investments to further scale our ecosystem,” the company said in its earnings statement. But neither can know for sure what the Total Addressable Market is because it's not yet a wholly mainstream area of consumerism. They're both hoping it becomes the next internet/cloud/music player/smartphone/wearable/app store/etc. type of play and they have a foothold and a head start that makes the investment worthwhile.
wan23 3y ago
It's actually very interesting. A lot of the things that people have been impressed by about Apple Vision pro was already possible with the Quest 3 (much of it with the Quest 2 as well). There are a lot of things wrong with Reality Labs as an organization (I used to work there) but I do think they're chasing something real.
thelastgallon 3y ago
Probably the first trillion dollar company with just 66K employees.
- elliotbnvl 3y ago
  Nvidia has a market cap of 1.5T and 26k employees.
GaelFG 3y ago
I assume most of losses come from headsets R&D, and subjectively i would bet on them too, the progress are amazing, a today 350$ headset have better quality than 5 year ago 1500-2k ones. Honnestly I thinks VR/AR is becoming really amazing for games, if a quest 3 quality headset is available for less than 400$ in a year of two i'm expecting a massive adoption in a few years. There is currently a bit of content problem : no enough gamer with headsets to attract spendings so no enough games to attracts gamers, so not enough gamers with headsets ... But I went again on vr game development some months ago and the technical progress are really sweet and major downside are being removed.
godelski 3y ago
It's really weird to see this headline where underneath is a stock ticker showing "AAPL -0.41%" and "META +21.0%" and then another article on the side under Trending titled "Meta shares surge 20% on soaring profit, better-than-expected guidance and first-ever dividend". Nothing is a lie here, but clearly the headlines convey certain ideals to people and those might not really match reality. And it seems like they're just playing the field, writing positively and negatively framed articles to appeal to whichever audience wants what. Why can I not just get one self contained coherent article that's something like "Meta shares surge despite major losses ahead of Apple's Vision Pro launch"? (or the reverse order). These are clearly aimed to be shared on social media and generate particular sentiment to those that only read headlines. Boy is the news a confusing mess.
- refulgentis 3y ago
  People tend to project their feeling of being overwhelmed by information onto the media/MSM/journalism. It's actually probably true that: - Apple's stock is slightly down today. - Facebook's stock is way up today. - Facebook netted -4.65B on VR. - Apple's Vision Pro launched today. Maybe it's from growing up on the internet, but my confusion starts when people expect The Media to be a monolith and project one consistent emotional vibe, and when they don't, to add _more_ confusion and start claiming that the news is being selected to drive a particular sentiment...even though their initial observation was there is no one singular comfortable bite-sized truth that wraps up VRs long-term story, today.
  - boristsr 3y ago
    I don't think that's a completely fair point. People don't read a news article to learn a single fact. They read a news article to put those facts in perspective and context. The complaints of this thread is that there are very conflicting facts and they don't feel the article (and other articles) is giving a fair representation of the overall picture, and rather feels like it's pandering to people who want to hear it framed in a particular way.
    - refulgentis 3y ago
fhub 3y ago
Meta is a revenue generating machine. They keep beating quarterly estimates. I think they have every right to invest in R&D that isn't profitable yet (or ever). Their staff are well compensated already so what should the do with the money in ways that won't hurt their revenue? They already open sourcing a lot of things and have committed to reaching net zero emissions in 6 years and I'm sure other "good" stuff. Note: I'm no fan of Meta's products and I've blocked FB/Meta domains for over a decade.
- sneed_chucker 3y ago
  Yeah I agree. If Meta was sticking to their core money generating businesses, then they'd be accused of stagnating and failing to innovate.
RealityVoid 3y ago
When I read article headlines like this... It just makes me want to buy some Meta stock. It's not like Quest 3 is a dud, it's a great device. And it is not a given that Vision Pro will be a hit. So that makes me think someone wants to spin a narrative and is trying damn' hard to sell it.
- criddell 3y ago
  > it is not a given that Vision Pro will be a hit I'd love to know internally what Apple and Meta would call a hit. Meta has shipped something like 25 million headsets now. That sounds like a hit to me. That's on the same scale as the Atari 2600.
geor9e 3y ago
They lost $42 billion on Oculus 3/Pro research. My brain cannot process these numbers. I do not see how it's possible. It's as if a football stadium of fans each had a suitcase of a million dollars and all threw it onto the field, then they torched it all with gasoline. They burned a million dollars, then burned another million dollars, then repeated that a thousand more times. Then this entire story repeated, 42 times. Nope, brain still isn't wrapping around it. I know how many useless product managers a big tech company can have wandering around making tiktoks, but that still doesn't explain the scale.
- blackoil 3y ago
  Don't know if it can justify 42 billion or how that is calculated. But to add at cutting age we underestimate cost of failed attempts. Calculating design/dev cost of final successful product misses all the designs and code that never made it to production.

38 points by taimurkazmi 3y ago

What is the breakdown for how this money is being used/spent? Understandably AR/VR is costly (hardware, software, etc), but I am wondering what percentage of this money is going to the AI research that can certainly help AR/VR but also be used in other contexts (as in the research allocated to AR/VR can be multi-purpose and not really a pure loss).

dpflan 3y ago
Actually, is Meta strategically using this for loss write-offs/tax evasion/tricky balance sheet mechanics/financial engineering? -- EDIT -- Thank you tomxor for entertaining a possible answer.
- DidISayTooMuch 3y ago
  Oh yes, just burn all the money so they can use it as a tax write-off? Does anyone really know how these tax write-offs work? People just use the term without any clear understanding. Meta like any sane company out there will probably use every rule to avoid (not evade) paying tax. Thats good for the shareholders. But this isn't one such measure, it's mostly R&D expenditure.
  - tomxor 3y ago
    It works as a tax free investment. So long as it actually pays off in the future, they get to skip tax by putting it straight into R&D now instead of tomorrow. Another thing they did was sell hardware below cost, so the public kind of benefit - but at the same time FB potentially benefit by undercutting competition and gaining market share... One way of framing that last one might be "Deciding how their tax is spent so that it might benefit Facebook" - from that perspective it doesn't seem like a bad idea (purely from the business side, not public interest) to burn the tax yourself for a little more control.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  You cant save money by losing money. Metas tax rate is 17%, write offs are still loses.
- boeingUH60 3y ago
  Spoken like the average armchair accountant.
tomxor 3y ago
Yeah I'd like to know. The article keeps framing it as "The metaverse division" and "sink billions of dollars a quarter into developing the metaverse"... but Reality Labs (basically Oculus) doesn't just do stupid metaverse/horizon-blah, they make the actual Quest. So I expect a decent chunk of this was the cost of developing their two recent hardware upgrades. I believe they may be back to selling at or below cost again, so part of that loss could also be a strategic loss for future market share. If more of it actually went into the metaverse nonsense then that's truly abominable, but the article presents no evidence for this. It seems like all of the media still doesn't realise the Quest is primarily a gaming platform and horizon is just a stupid side project Zuckerberg has forced upon them, to everyone who actually uses them this framing just seems ridiculous.
- wantsanagent 3y ago
  Since we're talking about billions of dollars here, I'd like to know how far down the production stack they are investing. The displays, optics, and processors in headsets are hungry for technological advances. So is Meta custom building meta-material grown silicon lenses (or other crazy sci fi stuff), or are they just trying to commercialize other peoples breakthroughs at the lowest levels?
  - RealityVoid 3y ago
    I suspect it's the latter, although I fail to even wrap my head around how the heck fundamental technological advances even happen. I mean you have people far removes from commercialization that pour a lot of time, money, knowledge and material into making this obscure little facet a tiiiny bit better. How do you even get to know what to improve, what needs improving, what _can_ be improved? How the heck do you even get funding for something so so very speculative?

oldpersonintx 3y ago

[dead]

DidISayTooMuch 3y ago

You gotta burn money to make money. This much cash burn is required to build the next gen level of infrastructure. Its a big bet for the company, let's see how it pays out. Haters going to say its all in vain, but no one knows how the future will look. Stock at ATH btw.

dpflan 3y ago
> "Note: Meta began reporting Reality Labs as its own segment in Q4 2020." RL has been burning money for a few years and similar rates, and this just happens to be the highest one at the moment. Q4 seems to always stand out as the largest loss each year. (According to the "Quarterly losses for Meta's Reality Labs" chart in the article).

jug 3y ago

> The metaverse division has now lost more than $42 billion since the end of 2020 I can't help but think of how this cash could have been spent on something that benefited everyone (in the dire covid/postcovid years no less) rather than the world's most expensive trial on whether people would rather meet in a MMO world than with their web cameras in a meeting app. Makes Star Citizen's $0.7B crowdfunding look cheap.

quest88 3y ago
I share your sentiments, but realistically how would one implement that? The US (where meta is based) government (ie, the people) can't agree what benefits everyone. The positive side is all of the jobs it paid for.
- LesZedCB 3y ago
  not allow private companies to accumulate so much capital by breaking them up and taxing them fairly. then use the budget for things like single payer healthcare and affordable housing
  - quest88 3y ago
    Well, again, the US citizens can't agree to that. So then what?
    - LesZedCB 3y ago
      increasing wealth inequality and unaccountable mega corporations. more of the same, basically. I don't "believe" there is a solution until enough people get really hungry.
  - boeingUH60 3y ago
    The US government already has enough money for these things. They refuse to do it because the citizenry isn’t in support..
- slimrec77 3y ago

Simon_ORourke 3y ago

The stench of doom emanating from Meta is starting to become over-powering. An out of touch CEO surrounded by yes men, who won't let him know the emperor has no clothes.

mateo411 3y ago
Yes, with a low market cap of 1.22 Trillion and the stock price is up over 20% today. The end is near indeed!
dboreham 3y ago
Meanwhile, stock is up 20% today..
- SteveNuts 3y ago
  Stock buybacks and announcing a new dividend will definitely do that on its own.
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    Metas buybacks are nothing new. The dividend pales in comparison to the buybacks. The dividend is $5 billion a year which is the amount theyve been buying back every quarter recently.

spogbiper 3y ago

Meanwhile "Meta shares jump after profit triples and company announces first-ever dividend", also from CNBC https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/01/meta-earnings-q4-2024.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/01/meta-earnings-q4-2024.html

criddell 3y ago

How does the Apple launch tie into Meta's loss? Is the implication that the losses are going to deepen now that Apple's device is out?

neogodless 3y ago
The last paragraph is maybe the only relevant one: > Sales of VR and AR headsets and glasses dropped almost 40% in 2023 to $664 million in 2023, as of Nov. 25, according to research firm Circana. An analyst at Circana told CNBC that the steep drop was likely due to a lack of new stand-alone VR headsets. You can read that either way though... sales are dropping, but maybe only because there wasn't anything new, so maybe they'll rebound. Beyond that, it's speculation. Meta is throwing money at the idea, and expects to throw even more at the idea. > “We expect operating losses to increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and our investments to further scale our ecosystem,” the company said in its earnings statement. But neither can know for sure what the Total Addressable Market is because it's not yet a wholly mainstream area of consumerism. They're both hoping it becomes the next internet/cloud/music player/smartphone/wearable/app store/etc. type of play and they have a foothold and a head start that makes the investment worthwhile.

wan23 3y ago

It's actually very interesting. A lot of the things that people have been impressed by about Apple Vision pro was already possible with the Quest 3 (much of it with the Quest 2 as well). There are a lot of things wrong with Reality Labs as an organization (I used to work there) but I do think they're chasing something real.

thelastgallon 3y ago

Probably the first trillion dollar company with just 66K employees.

elliotbnvl 3y ago
Nvidia has a market cap of 1.5T and 26k employees.

GaelFG 3y ago

I assume most of losses come from headsets R&D, and subjectively i would bet on them too, the progress are amazing, a today 350$ headset have better quality than 5 year ago 1500-2k ones. Honnestly I thinks VR/AR is becoming really amazing for games, if a quest 3 quality headset is available for less than 400$ in a year of two i'm expecting a massive adoption in a few years. There is currently a bit of content problem : no enough gamer with headsets to attract spendings so no enough games to attracts gamers, so not enough gamers with headsets ... But I went again on vr game development some months ago and the technical progress are really sweet and major downside are being removed.

godelski 3y ago

It's really weird to see this headline where underneath is a stock ticker showing "AAPL -0.41%" and "META +21.0%" and then another article on the side under Trending titled "Meta shares surge 20% on soaring profit, better-than-expected guidance and first-ever dividend". Nothing is a lie here, but clearly the headlines convey certain ideals to people and those might not really match reality. And it seems like they're just playing the field, writing positively and negatively framed articles to appeal to whichever audience wants what. Why can I not just get one self contained coherent article that's something like "Meta shares surge despite major losses ahead of Apple's Vision Pro launch"? (or the reverse order). These are clearly aimed to be shared on social media and generate particular sentiment to those that only read headlines. Boy is the news a confusing mess.

refulgentis 3y ago
People tend to project their feeling of being overwhelmed by information onto the media/MSM/journalism. It's actually probably true that: - Apple's stock is slightly down today. - Facebook's stock is way up today. - Facebook netted -4.65B on VR. - Apple's Vision Pro launched today. Maybe it's from growing up on the internet, but my confusion starts when people expect The Media to be a monolith and project one consistent emotional vibe, and when they don't, to add _more_ confusion and start claiming that the news is being selected to drive a particular sentiment...even though their initial observation was there is no one singular comfortable bite-sized truth that wraps up VRs long-term story, today.
- boristsr 3y ago
  I don't think that's a completely fair point. People don't read a news article to learn a single fact. They read a news article to put those facts in perspective and context. The complaints of this thread is that there are very conflicting facts and they don't feel the article (and other articles) is giving a fair representation of the overall picture, and rather feels like it's pandering to people who want to hear it framed in a particular way.
  - refulgentis 3y ago

fhub 3y ago

Meta is a revenue generating machine. They keep beating quarterly estimates. I think they have every right to invest in R&D that isn't profitable yet (or ever). Their staff are well compensated already so what should the do with the money in ways that won't hurt their revenue? They already open sourcing a lot of things and have committed to reaching net zero emissions in 6 years and I'm sure other "good" stuff. Note: I'm no fan of Meta's products and I've blocked FB/Meta domains for over a decade.

sneed_chucker 3y ago
Yeah I agree. If Meta was sticking to their core money generating businesses, then they'd be accused of stagnating and failing to innovate.

RealityVoid 3y ago

When I read article headlines like this... It just makes me want to buy some Meta stock. It's not like Quest 3 is a dud, it's a great device. And it is not a given that Vision Pro will be a hit. So that makes me think someone wants to spin a narrative and is trying damn' hard to sell it.

criddell 3y ago
> it is not a given that Vision Pro will be a hit I'd love to know internally what Apple and Meta would call a hit. Meta has shipped something like 25 million headsets now. That sounds like a hit to me. That's on the same scale as the Atari 2600.

geor9e 3y ago

They lost $42 billion on Oculus 3/Pro research. My brain cannot process these numbers. I do not see how it's possible. It's as if a football stadium of fans each had a suitcase of a million dollars and all threw it onto the field, then they torched it all with gasoline. They burned a million dollars, then burned another million dollars, then repeated that a thousand more times. Then this entire story repeated, 42 times. Nope, brain still isn't wrapping around it. I know how many useless product managers a big tech company can have wandering around making tiktoks, but that still doesn't explain the scale.

blackoil 3y ago
Don't know if it can justify 42 billion or how that is calculated. But to add at cutting age we underestimate cost of failed attempts. Calculating design/dev cost of final successful product misses all the designs and code that never made it to production.