MENLO PARK (dpa-AFX) – The expenditure planned by the Facebook group Meta (Meta Platforms (ex Facebook)) for the development of the so-called Metaverse could be significantly reduced. According to people familiar with the deliberations, budget cuts of 30 percent are in the offing, as the Bloomberg news agency reported on Thursday. These could also be accompanied by job cuts. The Meta share rose by 4 percent shortly after trading began.
According to the report, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg asked managers to look for savings potential in all areas during annual budget planning. The virtual reality division Quest is likely to feel the biggest cuts. And there are also plans to save a lot on Meta Horizon Worlds. However, no final decision has been made yet, it said.
Last but not least, Zuckerberg once used the plans to build a digital parallel universe as an opportunity to say goodbye to the old company name Facebook and rename the company Meta. The manager still believes that people will one day work and play in virtual worlds. The place for this should be the digital parallel universe Metaverse.
However, this vision has not yet taken hold. Since the Metaverse business unit was set up, it has made a loss of 70 billion dollars (60 billion euros) and is therefore now being viewed critically by analysts and investors.
And Zuckerberg himself no longer represents his idea as aggressively as before, but has recently focused more on building models and chatbots around the topic of artificial intelligence.
AI projects and products could also benefit from the proposed savings, explained analyst Matt Britzman from asset manager Hargreaves Lansdown./lew/men/mis
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