Meta’s Reality Labs posts $4.5 billion loss in second quarter

Meta’s ambitious plans to develop the metaverse is still costing the company billions of dollars a quarter.

As part of the company’s second-quarter earnings report on Wednesday,  Meta’s Reality Labs unit, which houses augmented and virtual reality technologies, recorded an operating loss of $4.48 billion. Analysts polled by StreetAccount were expecting a loss of $4.55 billion.

Since late 2020, the Reality Labs unit has generated cumulative losses of about $50 billion, underscoring CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s massive investments into the hardware and software that underpins what he says will be the next era of personal computing.

Revenue in Reality Labs, largely derived from the company’s Quest family of VR headsets and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, came in at $353 million, representing growth of 28% from $276 million a year earlier. Analysts were expecting the unit to bring in $371 million.

In September, Meta debuted the Quest 3 VR headset, which has a starting price of $499. A few months later, Apple released its Vision Pro VR and AR headset, which starts at $3,500. In June, CNBC reported that Apple started deliveries of its Vision Pro headset to China, where it has a retail price that starts at 29,999 yuan, or $4,128.

With the VR market remains nascent, Meta has been increasingly promoting its smart glasses, which it co-develops with Ray-Ban. Zuckerberg has pointed to advances in artificial intelligence and related large language models as improving the capabilities of smart glasses.

Earlier in July, Francesco Milleri, the CEO of Ray-Ban parent EssilorLuxottica, told analysts that Meta plans to become a shareholder in the European eyewear maker, expanding on a previous partnership between the two companies dating back to 2020.

Meta’s second generation of smart glasses went on sale in October with a starting price of $299. Zuckerberg said in April during an earnings call with analysts that there can be a “meaningful market for fashionable AI glasses without a display.”