Recently, in an interview with CNBC reporter Jim Cramer, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg affirmed that Metaverse could be an important part of the company's business operations in the second half of this decade.
We hope to basically reach about a billion people in Metaverse, each person buys digital goods, digital content, different things to serve their own purposes or things to decorate their virtual conference rooms, utilities to be able to operate more effectively in virtual reality as well as on the Metaverse overall, said Mark Zuckerberg.
However, in the first 6 months of this year, investors have cut the company's market capitalization due to the somewhat slower growth rate along with the number of daily active users of the company decreasing consecutively between the past two quarters.
The founder of Facebook said he is working to move the company towards what he sees as the next generation of content, a virtual world - where people can buy and sell digital goods for agency to communicate with each other.
The company's stock code icon has been changed from Facebook to Meta, a testament to Meta's determination to become a Metaverse platform rather than just a pure social networking site as before.
In fact, investments in augmented reality and virtual reality have been gathering since 2014 when the company decided to spend $2 billion to buy Oculus VR headphone maker.
Although the sales of the headphones are still far behind PC or smartphone products, despite all, Zuckerberg has always expressed optimism about the performance of the current 2-generation Meta Quest, with prices starting from 299 USD.
Zuckerberg told CNBC: Quest 2 was a resounding success.
Meta's CEO expressed, "I'm really happy. It exceeded my expectations. However, it will take time to reach the scale of hundreds of millions or even billions of people in Metaverse.
So that is the guideline and we will strive to achieve that. But you know, the other services we are currently operating are on a larger scale.
The experience in Metaverse can be richer than text, photos or videos, which is popular on Metas Facebook and Instagram, so this will be a big topic for Meta in the next decade, said Mark Zuckerberg.
The co-founder of Facebook said that the experiences in Metaverse can enhance the feeling of being together, even when users are at the two ends of the country. Users can communicate by eye, something that was not guaranteed in video calls before.
According to Zuckerberg, this technology basically contributes to making it look realistic. However, to bring that to customers soon, Meta will need to release more hardware, software and enhance the experience in the next few years.
We are at a time when the company is capable of making some large investments in long-term research, Metas founder added.
Zuckerberg expressed hope that the economy around Metaverse will grow strongly in the near future.
Up to now, the Meta platform has reached 3.64 billion monthly active users on the application line in the first quarter, up 6% over the same period last year. Facebook reached 2 billion users in 2020 and this is also considered a field in which Zuckerberg sees potential for development.
You know, our goal over time is to build services, try to serve as many people as possible, bring our services to one billion, two billion, three billion people and then basically expand the scale of making money. We have done that with Facebook and Instagram, WhatsApp will definitely be the next target, Zuckerberg said.
