Meta (formerly Facebook) shares rise despite $13B VR loss

奔跑财经-FinaceRun · 2023-02-02T02:32:44.000Z

This news is good news for traditional investors, but bad news for metaverse and NFT hopefuls. Meta (formerly Facebook ) reported good news for regular investors but bad news for those interested in its virtual reality (VR) unit in its Feb. 1 earnings report. The company has impressive revenue, with revenue of $32.17 billion in the fourth quarter of 2022 and $116.61 billion for the full year. Despite year-over-year losses (4% in Q4 and 1% for the full year), Meta's fourth-quarter revenue was at the high end of its previously forecast $3.0 to $32.5 billion estimate, and the company today also announced $40 billion in revenue. Buyback Program.

The news is good for traditional investors, but bad news for metaverse and NFT hopefuls.
Meta ⁠— formerly Facebook ⁠— reported good news for regular investors in its Feb. 1 earnings report, but bad news for those interested in its virtual reality (VR) division.
The company has impressive revenues, with $32.17 billion in Q4 2022 and $116.61 billion for the full year. Despite year-over-year losses (4% in Q4 and 1% for the full year), Meta's Q4 revenues were at the high end of its previously forecast estimate of $3.0 to $32.5 billion, and the company also announced a $40 billion buyback program today.
The news had a positive impact on the value of META shares, which rose by 2.79% on the day. META rose from $148.01 to $153.12 in the past few hours.
Meta also reported an operating loss of $4.28 billion for its Reality Labs division in the fourth quarter of 2022, and an operating loss of $13.72 billion for the full year. According to CNBC, the division's revenue decline appears to be due to lower sales and demand for VR technology that can be used with its devices.
Reality Labs is responsible for Meta's "metaverse" products, including services like the Horizon Worlds game and products like the Quest headset. Starting in 2022, Reality Labs also began to be responsible for various artificial intelligence (AI) projects.
However, Reality Labs’ metaverse ambitions are best known in the crypto community for spurring a trend toward non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in virtual reality projects. Horizon Worlds features in-game tradable items, and while it doesn’t use NFTs as the basis for those items, competing blockchain projects have already capitalized on the similarity.
Just after Meta announced its metaverse plans in late October 2021, the MANA token of the cryptocurrency-based VR world Decentraland rose by about 550% in November 2021. Similarly, The Sandbox’s SAND token rose by 850% that month. Several mainstream companies have also begun pursuing metaverse and NFT initiatives.
The hype surrounding this trend subsided in 2022, and the aforementioned tokens have fallen back to their base prices. Today’s news suggests the trend could weaken further.