I was scratching my head last night about an "internal" memo that was "leaked" to Business Insider:
"2024 was a pivotal year for Reality Labs and positioned us for greatness in 2025," [Reality Labs' head Andrew] Bosworth wrote. "The team beat nearly all of last year's aggressive sales and user goals, growing RL sales >40% YoY overall," he added. "We are seeing massive sales growth in wearables and the Quest brand has never been stronger."
First off, it's strange Bosworth did not cite a single hard sales number in an "internal" memo. Also, saying "growing RL sales >40% YoY" (emphasis mine) is an important qualifier, as that only refers to VR/XR sales in retail/brick and mortar stores. Which isn't impressive if (as likely) 2023 was slow for retail -- especially as compared to 2024, when Meta's Ray Ban smart glasses were heavily discounted.
More key, if you check out Matthew Ball's latest video game data report (mandatory reading!), XR headset sales (and Reality Labs' devices in particular), continue to be notably "down-to-flat". Which is basically confirmed today in Meta's earnings call:
The social media giant reported fourth-quarter earnings Wednesday and said its Reality Labs unit recorded an operating loss of $4.97 billion while generating $1.1 billion in sales. Analysts were projecting that unit to log a fourth-quarter operating loss of $5.4 billion on $1.1 billion in sales.
So I guess the best you can say is the losses were slightly less worse than expected.
Remember to be skeptical of any "leaked" report that doesn't include hard numbers or does come with odd qualifiers like "RL".
And once again, we are talking about a company that ignored research that VR headsets tend to make half the population literally vomit. So don't be surprised if they're trying to spin that fundamental fail into seeming like success.
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