New Delhi: Facebook Inc CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday revealed the company’s ambition to build a ‘metaverse’, where it is investing billions to build a hardware-focused entity that will work on the technology. Speaking during Facebook’s third-quarter earnings call with analysts on Monday, the CEO addressed a number of issues and insisted that the company begin publishing the financial results of its augmented and virtual reality labs as a separate entity. Will give
Facebook Chief Financial Officer David Wehner explained that from the fourth quarter of 2021, it will break out Facebook Reality Labs as a separate reporting segment from Facebook’s family of apps. Wehner said the company expects its investment in its hardware division, Facebook Reality Labs, to reduce total operating profit by about $10 billion in 2021.
Why is the Metaverse important to Facebook?
In the coming years, Zuckerberg said Facebook would be viewed not as a social media firm but as a company focused on the metaverse. The term buzzy broadly refers to a shared virtual environment that can be accessed by people using different devices. “This is a key investment area for us and an important part of our strategy going forward,” he said.
Facebook, which has invested heavily in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), including companies like Oculus, this year formed a product team to work on the metaverse. In October, the company plans to hire 10,000 employees in Europe over the next five years to work on the initiative. “It’s not an investment that’s going to be profitable for us any time in the near future,” Zuckerberg told analysts. “But we basically believe that the Metaverse is going to be the successor to the mobile Internet.”
For the third quarter, Facebook reported monthly active users of 2.91 billion, up 6 percent from a year ago, but lower than analysts’ estimates.
What are the other focus areas for Facebook?
“Our three product priorities are our focus on creators, commerce, and building the next computing platform,” Zuckerberg said in a post on his microblogging platform. The CEO emphasized its focus on engaging young adults, including its short video feature.answer“
“One aspect of this is making all of our apps aim to best serve young adults, who we define as ages 18-29,” the CEO said. And during this period, competition has become even more intense, especially with the rise in popularity of Apple’s iMessage and more recently the rise of TikTok, which is one of the most dominant competitors we’ve ever encountered.
“it is us Reimagining our teams to serve young adults His North Star rather than adapted for a large number of older people,” Zuckerberg said, a change he said “will take years, not months, to be fully executed. “That’s why we’re redesigning our teams to make young adults our North Star, rather than adapting to a large number of older people,” he said.
NS Next product priority is commerce. Helping people find new products that interest them and reach customers within our apps is going to unlock a lot of opportunities. As Apple’s changes make e-commerce and customer acquisition on the web less effective, solutions that allow businesses to set up shop within our apps will become increasingly attractive and important to them.
Beyond reels and commerce, the company will focus long-term efforts on building the next computing platform and bringing the metaverse to life.
With inputs from Reuters
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