Goal (Facebook) seems to have new problems that could harm their future projects. According to reports from the CNBC, Mark Zuckerberg’s firm has begun to take measures to try to appease the poor forecasts for the coming months, as well as to deal with the slow growth in income caused, among other things, by Apple’s new privacy policy. The new plans, however, could have a main drawback that would affect, above all, the future metaverse.
The company’s main strategy to deal with slow revenue growth and possible future losses, in particular, is temporarily reduce or pause the hiring of new talent “medium and higher level”, as well as the hiring of “initial level” engineers, according to the aforementioned media. A spokesman for Meta has confirmed the facts claiming that the firm is “slowing growth” after evaluating the expense forecast for the current earnings period.
Facebook, in fact, could report its first year-over-year revenue dropl during the second quarter of the year, as the company forecasts revenues of between 28,000 and 30,000 million dollars. It is a low well below reported revenue during the second quarter of 2021 ($29 billion). Although the first quarter of 2022 had a 7% increase in revenue compared to the same period of the previous year, the pace of growth is considerably lower than it was years ago. The company believes that the Ukraine War —and more specifically the suspension of services in Russia—, Apple’s strict privacy policy that harms its advertising business, could be the main culprits.
Meta has no choice but to hit the brakes on the development of her metaverse
This forecast of expenses, in addition, comes at a time when Meta (Facebook) is focusing practically all its efforts on the creation of the metaverse. In fact, the division focused on virtual reality —and therefore, on the metaverse— does nothing but lose millions due to its constant (and probably expensive) development. Financial results related to the first quarter of the year reflected that Reality Labs lost 2,960 million dollarss compared to the same period of the previous year. However, until now it had not been an impediment to continue investing money in this area.
The new forecasts, therefore, make progress in the creation of the metaverse much more difficult. Mainly, pbecause pausing hiring means limiting the number of employees focused on developing that virtual world. Meta even assured that it would create 10,000 additional jobs in Europe for the creation of the metaverse. But taking into account the previously mentioned plans, it is clear that now the objective is to hit the brakes.