Meta Focusing Only 20 Percent of Resources on Developing Hardware, Software for Metaverse: Zuckerberg

Around 80 percent of Meta’s focus still lies on its family of social networking platforms — Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Written by Radhika Parashar, Edited by Siddharth Suvarna | Updated: 1 December 2022 13:54 IST

Meta Focusing Only 20 Percent of Resources on Developing Hardware, Software for Metaverse: Zuckerberg

Photo Credit: DealBook/ Twitter

Facebook rebranded to Meta last year

Highlights

Zuckerberg says metaverse makes communication richer
Meta has been seeing losses in its metaverse-focussed unit
Zuckerberg however, remains hopeful for a bright future for metaverse

Mark Zuckerberg, despite facing big losses in Meta's metaverse section, has reiterated belief in the next-gen technology. The chief of Meta has decided to give five to ten years before metaverse blooms into the promising industry it looks like in present times. At present, only 20 percent of Meta's functional focus is on developing the hardware and software to support the metaverse ecosystem, Zuckerberg noted in a recent speech. On the other hand, 80 percent of Meta's focus still lies on its family of social networking platforms — Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Zuckerberg, 38, was speaking virtually at the New York Times DealBook Summit when he noted that his company needs to work more efficiently in order to finetune the metaverse tech on a wider scale. The tech mogul has said that the metaverse technology makes communication more interactive and overall richer.

Zuckerberg joined American journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin in a metaverse setting, where avatars of the two discussed Meta's future plans of making interactions via a screen “more immersive and feel a bit more human”.

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Before an interview about the company's challenges and its future, Meta C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg joined Andrew Ross Sorkin in the metaverse (where he had a bout of hiccups). Watch the interaction. #DealBook pic.twitter.com/CpSJRZfRjk
— DealBook (@dealbook) November 30, 2022

Meta, currently has a dedicated unit called Reality Labs, that focusses on the research and development around its metaverse initiatives.

In Meta's Q2 earnings call back in July, Zuckerberg had announced that the company's Reality Labs division reported losses of a whopping $2.81 billion (roughly Rs. 22,410 crore).

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The division's year-to-date losses stood at a floundering $5.77 billion (roughly Rs. 46,016 crore) around July this year. In fact, last year, Reality Labs posted an alerting annual loss of $10.2 billion (roughly Rs. 81,346 crore).

The billionaire has, time and again, been dragged under the spotlight for rebranding Facebook into a Web3-centric firm last year, that has caused financial dips to the company.

In October, for instance, Sam Bankman-Fried had ‘dissected' Zuckerberg's metaverse plans saying that the company's rebranding was just a trick for Facebook to churn billions by projecting itself as a ‘vague, unclear, and futuristic enough' space. Bankman-Fried was the chief of the now collapsed FTX crypto exchange, who has been adding bulky investments into the Web3 industry.

Despite reporting losses, Zuckerberg has exuded confidence that in the coming years all the trials and errors that are costing the company billions of dollars right now, will refine the metaverse technology for better.

“Scepticism doesn't bother me too much. We've had doubters the whole time,” the Meta chief noted.

Facebook was rebranded to Meta last year, as part of Zuckerberg's strategy to drum up the metaverse sector before the technology explodes into its full potential.

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Further reading: Cryptocurrency, Mark Zuckerberg, Metaverse, Web3, Meta

Radhika Parashar

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Radhika Parashar is a senior correspondent for Gadgets 360. She has been reporting on tech and telecom for the last three years now and will be focussing on writing about all things crypto. Besides this, she is a major sitcom nerd and often replies in Chandler Bing and Michael Scott references. For tips or queries you could reach out to her at RadhikaP@ndtv.com. More