It will end production of its smart display, the Portal, as well as work on smartwatch projects, Meta executives said Friday during an open staff meeting.
On Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a letter to the company’s employees that 11,000 employees, or about 13 percent of its workforce, will be laid off, the first mass layoffs in the company’s 18-year history.
The layoff came amid a difficult time for Meta, to which Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and others belong, which provided weak forecasts in late October for the profits of the current fourth quarter, which frightened investors, and caused its shares to fall by about 20 percent.
It is reported that other departments were greatly affected by the layoffs, such as the machine learning department, which laid off its employees completely, although Zuckerberg said in his message: The company has shifted more of its resources to a number of high-priority growth areas, such as the artificial intelligence-based content discovery engine, advertising sector, business sector platforms, as well as metaverses.
And it seems that Zuckerberg really wants to focus on metaverses, a virtual world that has not yet matured and can be entered through virtual and augmented reality glasses. Investing in this area has cost Meta more than $9.4 billion so far in 2022, and the company expects losses to grow significantly year-on-year.
Over the past period, investors have been concerned about the rising costs and expenses of Meta, especially on metaverses, which jumped 19 percent year-over-year in the third quarter to $22.1 billion. Meta’s total sales fell 4 percent year-on-year to $27.71 billion in the third quarter, while its operating income fell 46 percent from a year earlier to $5.66 billion.