Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg seems to be relaxing his claim about the metaverse as he has favoured WhatsApp and Facebook’s messenger to become the company’s next pair of sales growth for the company over the highly ambitious metaverse project.
Zuckerberg, who was speaking at a company-wide meeting, said the pair of social apps were more likely to be the company’s flagship sales product ahead of the metaverse.
“We talk a lot about the very long-term opportunities like the metaverse, but the reality is that business messaging is probably going to be the next major pillar of our business as we work to monetize WhatsApp and Messenger more,” Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg’s comments seem to be designed to relax investors’ anxiety over Meta’s huge spending on its Reality Labs unit which is responsible for creating the immersive metaverse.
The company’s plan to monetize the WhatsApp business platform could be seen as a strategy that could wedge Meta’s falling stock on the market. Investors have heavily criticised the reasoning behind Meta’s aggressive funding of the metaverse, which is set to take over a decade to become mainstream and profitable.
Zuckerberg during the meeting, defended the amount the company was spending in developing the metaverse. Meta reportedly spent over $10 billion in the past year on the metaverse, with 20% of the company’s budget being thrown at its Reality Labs.
Zuckerberg has envisioned the metaverse as a future where we will work, play and communicate using avatars, that would also replace the use of our modern day smartphones. But the company would have to potentially contend against deep-pocketed rivals such as Apple, which has been speculated to be making plans for the release of its own virtual reality headsets, which Meta makes use of for the metaverse.
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