Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg received more bad news through the holiday season as his foray into the metaverse has yet to pay dividends for his struggling tech company.
Sales of virtual reality (VR) headsets declined 2% year-over-year in 2022, researchers told CNBC on Wednesday.
As of early December, sales of VR headsets generated just $1.1 billion, in accordance with the research analytics firm NDP Group.
Ben Arnold, NPD’s consumer electronics analyst, told CNBC that sales of Meta’s $400-per-unit Quest 2 VR headset, which is taken into account the standard-setter out there, also declined, though he didn’t say by how much.
Overall, there was a 12% drop within the number of world augmented reality (AR) and VR headset shipments in comparison with 2021, in accordance with the analytics firm CCS Insight. There have been 9.6 million deliveries worldwide of headsets this yr.
“VR had an incredible holiday in 2021,” Arnold told CNBC. “It was an ideal time last yr to get one in all these products, and VR totally crushed it.”
Revenue generated from sales of VR headsets doubled last yr from $530 million in 2020, in accordance with NPD.
Meta’s stock price has lost two-thirds of its value as the corporate pivoted away from its ad-based, bread-and-butter business model.Bloomberg via Getty Images
The Post has sought comment from NPD and Meta.
Meta, the parent company of social media apps Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has pivoted from its traditional, bread-and-butter ad-based business model to the metaverse, which is powered by VR and AR technology.
However the shift has come at a major cost to Meta’s bottom line.
The corporate has seen the worth of its stock dip by greater than 65% from the beginning of this yr. As of Wednesday, Meta’s stock price was down by around 0.5%.
AR and VR headsets are used to access the metaverse.REUTERS
In late October, Meta announced a drop in revenue for the second consecutive quarter.
The Menlo Park, Calif.-company earned $4.4 billion, or $1.64 per share, within the three-month period that ended Sept. 30. That’s down 52% from, $9.19 billion, or $3.22 per share, in the identical period a yr earlier.
Revenue fell 4% to $27.71 billion from $29.01 billion, barely higher than the $27.4 billion that analysts had predicted.
Zuckerberg, whose net price was valued at $44.4 billion as of Wednesday, was price a personal all-time high of $140 billion last yr.
The metaverse is a term coined in 1992 by creator Neal Stephenson in his sci-fi book “Snow Crash.”Meta
While Zuckerberg has preached patience and is playing the long game, his bet on the metaverse has to this point turned out to be a failure.
Jim Cramer, the CNBC analyst who vocally touted his support of Zuckerberg and his company’s management team, gave an emotional, on-air mea culpa in October after Meta released its most up-to-date earnings report.
Meta can have its work cut out for it as other tech giants move into the metaverse in hopes of grabbing VR headset market share.
Apple, Sony, Valve, and Hewlett Packard are either planning to unveil their very own headsets or have already offered their products in the marketplace.
