Reality Labs, Meta’s virtual reality (VR) subsidiary and the Metaverse, has reported its eighth consecutive quarter of loss. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who deems the technology a “huge opportunity,” is yet unwavering in his commitment to investing in it. Zuckerberg recognized that such losses would persist for several years until VR applications and its Metaverse platform are developed enough to take advantage of the “huge opportunity” worth “hundreds of billions of dollars” on July 27 during Meta’s Q2 earnings call. “The Metaverse is a massive opportunity for a number of reasons. I feel even more strongly now that developing these platforms will unlock hundreds of billions of dollars, if not, trillions over time.” Reality Labs Experiencing Operational Losses In Meta’s Q2 financial announcement earlier in the day, it was clear that Reality Labs had been experiencing a prolonged period of operational losses. Losses of this kind are not uncommon for research and development divisions. To integrate Meta users using its numerous social platforms, such as the Metaverse, with the Oculus range of VR headsets, Reality Labs creates VR and augmented reality (AR) applications. Reality Lab saw a decline in revenue in 2021 and a decrease in operating margin since 2020. The Q2 2022 sales of $11.1 billion and the margin of 29% reported were the lowest in the previous seven quarters. According to Zuckerberg, a “difficult macro climate” may worsen t...
