META Group

Feb 2, 2023

February 2, 2023 Despite the austerity course, the Meta Group continues to spend a lot of money on the controversial development of the Metaverse. The Reality Labs division, which bundles the VR business, posted an operating loss of around $4.3 billion in the last quarter. The Facebook group Meta performed better than analysts had expected in the past quarter, despite another decline in sales. The relief of investors erupted in a price jump of a good 20 percent in after-hours trading. Meta also ramped up its share buybacks by $40 billion, and founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced further cost cuts. 2023 should be a “year of efficiency” for the group, said Zuckerberg. The focus is on being “stronger and more agile”. Meta will remove layers in middle management so decisions can be made faster. Projects that do not bring the desired results should be stopped more quickly. Elimination of around 11,000 jobs Meta had already announced that around 11,000 jobs would be cut last fall. The company booked $4.2 billion in restructuring charges for the quarter. In the current year, expenses are also expected to be lower than previously estimated, partly due to lower investments in data centers. In the last quarter, group sales fell by four percent year-on-year to a good 32.16 billion US dollars (around 29.3 billion euros). Somewhat lower proceeds of 31.5 billion US dollars had been expected on the market. Meta, with its business pillars Facebook and Instagram, was already hit by the slowdown in the online advertising market in previous quarters. Now there have been signs of recovery in travel and healthcare ads. Bottom line, quarterly profit fell 55 percent to $4.65 billion. Meanwhile, the number of users continues to grow. Facebook now has two billion daily active users – an increase of 16 million within three months. At least one Meta app was last used by 2.96 billion users per day, up from 2.93 billion three months earlier. Despite the new frugality, the group continues to spend a lot of money on the controversial development of digital worlds under the keyword “Metaverse”. The Reality Labs division, which bundles the virtual reality business, posted an operating loss of around $4.3 billion in the past quarter. This also includes restructuring costs, said CFO Susan Li. For the whole of 2022, the operating minus added up to 13.7 billion US dollars – with sales of only 2.16 billion US dollars. *The article has been translated based on the content of com! professional by www.com-magazin.de . If there is any problem regarding the content, copyright, please leave a report below the article. We will try to process as quickly as possible to protect the rights of the author. Thank you very much! *We just want readers to access information more quickly and easily with other multilingual content, instead of information only available in a certain language. *We always respect the copyright of the content of the author and always include the original link of the source article.If the author disagrees, just leave the report below the article, the article will be edited or deleted at the request of the author. Thanks very much! Best regards! Report Content