Meta’s metaverse has lost over $10 billion so far this year

Meta’s metaverse division, Reality Labs, has posted a total loss of around $11 billion since the first quarter of 2023. This is evident from Meta’s recent quarterly figures. Although Reality Labs continues to post losses, the tech company has posted the highest profits across the board in years.

During the announcement of its quarterly figures became known that Meta’s Reality Labs division made a loss of $3.7 billion in the past three months, exactly the same as in the previous quarter. Since the fourth quarter of 2020, the first quarter in which Reality Labs was classified as its own department in the quarterly figures, this division has made a total loss of more than 37 billion dollars. Meta says it expects losses in this sector to increase ‘significantly’ in the coming year, ‘due to our continued investments in augmented and virtual reality product development and scaling our ecosystem’.

Yet the company achieved a total turnover of $34 billion, of which $11.6 billion was profit. The profit margin is therefore the highest in two years, says Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg according to The Guardian during the presentation of the quarterly figures. Profit was 48.7 percent higher than the previous quarter and 163.6 percent higher than in the third quarter of 2022. Revenue was $27.7 billion a year ago.

Furthermore, Meta’s platforms averaged 3.14 billion daily users in the quarter and a total of 3.96 billion monthly active users. Both of those are new records for Meta. Zuckerberg further states that the new social media platform Threads currently has ‘just under’ a hundred million users. Threads is currently not available in the European Union.