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Mark Zuckerberg says his company is going all in metaverse last year. On Wednesday, he showed how much he should spend for it.

Meta, the company that Mr. Zuckerberg founded as Facebook, said its Reality Labs division, which produces virtual reality glasses, smart glasses and other products yet to be released, lost more than $10 billion in 2021 when starting the business. . These products are key to Mr. Zuckerberg’s vision. metadata storea new generation internet where people will share their virtual worlds and experiences on different software and hardware platforms.

Meta has revealed for the first time the results of its hardware division. In the past, the company was unable to disclose these figures as products such as virtual reality headsets were only a small part of its overall business, which depended on social networking and digital advertising. Investing $10 billion in metadata is more than five times what Facebook paid to buy it. Oculus VR business in 2014 and 10 times what Instagram paid to buy in 2012.

The spending slashed the company’s quarterly profits, which fell 8 percent, to $10.3 billion from the previous year. Meta’s stock fell nearly 22 percent in after-hours trading.

“We had a solid quarter as people turned to our products to stay connected and businesses continued to use our services to grow,” Mr Zuckerberg said in a statement. “I’m encouraged by the progress we’ve made over the past year in a number of key growth areas such as Reels, commerce and virtual reality, and we will continue to invest in these and other key priorities in 2022 as we work to build the metaverse. ”

The descriptions show how much a new direction Meta is heading. In October, Mr. Zuckerberg announced that he plans to spend heavily on metadata in the coming years, a big shift for a company stuck in endless social networking controversies involving misinformation and hate speech. The meta has since started a sweep. internal transformationrestructuring itself and forcing employees to join augmented reality and virtual reality teams.

Competing at full throttle against the meta other tech giants claiming ground in the theoretical metaverse. last month, when Microsoft says it’s buying video game maker Activision Blizzard The software maker cited the nearly $70 billion deal as a building block for the metaverse, even though Activision doesn’t produce virtual reality games. Google has also been working on metaverse-related technology for years, and Apple has its own devices.

Funding Meta’s expansion into metadata was the main advertising business that continued to grow. The company said revenue for the three months ended December rose 20 percent to $33.7 billion year-over-year. Wall Street analysts had predicted a profit of $10.9 billion on revenue of $33.4 billion.

The company also announced plans to change its stock to trade under the symbol META on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange instead of FB.