Facebook CEO Zuckerberg Reveals Three Focus Areas, Says 'Metaverse Important Part Of Our Strategy'
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook will be seen not as a social media firm but as a company focused on the metaverse
New Delhi: Facebook Inc CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday revealed the company's ambition to build the 'metaverse' where it is investing billions to build a hardware-focused unit that will work on the technology. Speaking during Facebook's third-quarter earnings call with analysts on Monday, the CEO addressed several issues and stressed that the company will start publishing the financial results of its augmented and virtual reality labs as a separate unit.
David Wehner, Facebook's chief financial officer, informed that starting in the fourth quarter of 2021, it would break out Facebook Reality Labs as a separate reporting segment from Facebook's family of apps. Wehner said the company expected its investment in its hardware division, Facebook Reality Labs, to reduce overall operating profit in 2021 by approximately $10 billion.
Why does Metaverse assume significance for Facebook?
In the coming years, Zuckerberg said Facebook will be seen not as a social media firm but as a company focused on the metaverse. The buzzy term refers broadly to a shared virtual environment that can be accessed by people using different devices. “This is a major area of investment for us and an important part of our strategy going forward,” he added.
Facebook, which has invested heavily in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), including buying companies like Oculus, this year created 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 this initiative. "This is not an investment that is 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 per cent from a year ago but short of analysts' estimates.
What are other focus areas for Facebook?
“Our three product priorities remain our focus on creators, commerce, and building the next computing platform,” said Zuckerberg in a post on his microblogging platform. The CEO also emphasized its focus on attracting young adults, including through its short video feature "Reels."
“One aspect of this is giving all our apps the goal of being the best services for young adults, which we define as ages 18-29,” added the CEO. And during this period, competition has also gotten more intense, especially with Apple's iMessage growing in popularity and more recently the rise of TikTok, which is one of the most effective competitors that we have ever faced.
"We are retooling our teams to make serving young adults their North Star rather than optimizing for the larger number of older people," said Zuckerberg, a shift he said would take "years, not months, to fully execute. “So we are retooling our teams to make serving young adults their north star, rather than optimizing for the larger number of older people,” he added.
The next product priority is commerce. Helping people discover new products that they're interested in and reach customers inside our apps is going to unlock a lot of opportunities. As Apple's changes make e-commerce and customer acquisition less effective on the web, solutions that allow businesses to set up shop right inside our apps will become increasingly attractive and important to them.
Beyond Reels and commerce, the company will focus on longer-term efforts to build the next computing platform and bring the metaverse to life.
With inputs from Reuters
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