Meta released its earnings report for the fourth quarter of 2024 on Wednesday. According to the report, Reality Lab lost $4.97 billion (approximately Rs 430.4 billion) in 2024 in the fourth quarter. During the same period, Meta’s subsidiary lost US$1.1 billion (approximately Rs 952.6 billion). Meta’s total revenue in 2024 was US$164.5 billion (approximately Rs 14,24,608 crore), a 22% increase from the previous year, the company said. Metatech will increase more growth in the future.
Real-life labs operating losses reach $60 billion
With these figures, Meta’s reality show lab unit has reportedly lost the company $60 billion (the company’s operating losses since its inception in August 2020 are around Rs 5195,999 crore).
Meta’s Reality Labs department is responsible for research and development in augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR) – when combined, these technologies form the basis of the Metaverse ecosystem. Since its inception, the subsidiary has posted losses continuously.
Zuckerberg said the Reality Lab was one of the meta-units on the latest earnings call, which significantly contributed to its growth. To explain the losses of the reality lab, the head of Meta said: “The generated AI, the reality lab is usually more technical organizations, which means higher costs and space are the relativity of its business functions.”
Despite the losses, Zuckerberg remains optimistic about the future of metatechnology. “This will also be a critical year for the meta-representative,” he said. “The number of people using Quest and Horizon has been growing steadily, and that’s a lot of the long-term investments we’ve been making will make the Metaverse visually A more amazing and inspiring year.”
Reality Labs lost $13.7 billion (about Rs 11.22 crore) in 2022. Last year, Meta revealed that the Reality Lab lost $46.5 billion, while generating nearly $11 billion (approximately Rs 91,744 crore) and revenues of 42,223 in the fourth quarter.
In June 2024, Meta divided its reality lab team into two separate entities, one dedicated to task headsets for metavideo and the other for hardware wearables that Meta may launch in the future. Some workers were fired. A month later, the company released job openings on the Meta Metavers Encent Leaderslion team.
