Meta Q2 Sales Jump 22% in Wall Street Beat as Its AR/VR and Metaverse Business Loses Billions

Meta‘s social-media empire keeps minting digital-ad dollars — while its metaverse and AR/VR business continues to rack up bigger losses.

The company, which operates apps including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, reported top-line revenue of $39.07 billion (virtually all of it from advertising), up 22% year over year. Net income was $13.47 billion, or $5.16 per share. Wall Street on average expected revenue of $38.31 billion and EPS of $4.73, according to financial data provider LSEG.

“We had a strong quarter, and Meta AI is on track to be the most used AI assistant in the world by the end of the year,” Meta co-founder, CEO and chairman Mark Zuckerberg said in announcing the earnings. He added, “We’ve released the first frontier-level open source AI model, we continue to see good traction with our Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, and we’re driving good growth across our apps.”

The company said it expects third quarter 2024 total revenue to be $38.5 billion-$41 billion, in line with analyst expectations.

Meanwhile, Meta’s Reality Labs segment — which houses the Quest AR/VR headset and metaverse initiatives — posted a higher loss for Q2, as Zuckerberg’s passion project continues to burn up cash. The unit had quarterly sales of $353 million (up 28%) and an operating loss of $4.49 billion (versus a loss of $3.74 billion a year earlier). Reality Labs has now lost an aggregate of $59.5 billion since the start of 2019. The company has said that in 2024, it expects Reality Labs operating losses to “increase meaningfully” year-over-year “due to our ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and our investments to further scale our ecosystem.”

Meta also is investing heavily in artificial intelligence. In April, the company raised its forecast for 2024 capital spending to be $35 billion-$40 billion for the year (versus $30 billion-$37 billion previously), citing an acceleration of AI-related infrastructure investments. On Wednesday, the tech giant narrowed the full-year capex forecast to $37 billion-$40 billion.

As of Q1 2024, Meta no longer reports average monthly users for its family of apps, or daily or monthly user figures for the flagship Facebook app. For June 2024, the number of daily active users across Meta’s family of apps averaged 3.27 billion, an increase of 7% year-over-year.