Facebook’s metaverse bet loses $3bn in three months

Meta’s attempts to move to the metaverse have lost $3bn in the last quarter. The former Facebook’s figures for Q1 were a marked improvement on its disastrous fourth quarter, sending shares up 19% in after-hours trading. The company’s reported total revenue for the quarter was $27.91bn, just missing analysts’ estimates of $28.2bn, according to IBES data from Refinitiv. Wednesday’s earnings are Meta’s first since a dramatic report in February, when Meta lost a record $230bn in market value after revealing that Facebook had recorded its first drop in daily user numbers. The company booked $7.5bn in profit in the January-March quarter, down 21% from the same period last year but above Wall Street’s expectations of about $7.1bn. But Meta’s investment in the metaverse will be slow to pay off, analysts have warned – and its costs reflect that: Reality Labs, its virtual reality research and product development sector, lost $2.96bn in this period, compared with $1.83bn in losses this time last year. Its revenue was $695m. The group changed its corporate name from Facebook to Meta as part of an expensive bet on the metaverse, a virtual realm where users interact without being physically together. The Times (£) The FT (£) The Guardian