What Display Daily thinks: Everyone’s greatest strength is also their greatest weakness. Your strengths are what you gravitate towards, and the more pronounced they, the easier they are to anticipate and to make adjustments for. At least if you are in any competitive situation.
The strength of microdisplays has been fundamentally tied up in the promise of near-eye displays for AR and VR devices. There’s really only two companies that have the muscle to move the technology forward and to drive consumer adoption on a large scale, Meta and Apple. Meta because, well, look at the data below. The company is spending money on it at levels that boggle the mind.
Apple because it needs an iPhone moment and it is banking on something to do with spatial computing. Whatever that means.
Frankly, the best in the world for microdisplay technology is if there were no microdisplay applications in AR and VR. Maybe then the focus would be on broader markets and maybe there would be more emphasis on accelerating developments for mass consumption. The narrow needs of AR and VR markets are just pushing developments to adapt for stuff that is of less importance in IT products or TVs or automotive. No inter-pupillary distance issues. No vergence accommodations. No tracking. No passthrough consideration. None of which actually have anything to do with progressing the manufacturing of MicroLED displays, for example.
Just find more display real estate to build and get there as quickly as possible. Enough with the esoteric emphasis on features and functions that matter to a handful of consumers. There’s bigger fish to fry and judging by the numbers from Meta’s sales, they don’t seem to be swimming towards AR and VR headsets no matter how many thousands of dollars you spot each one.
Meta’s Financials and Stock Price are Stellar but Reality Labs Ain’t Nothing of the Kind
I should only have to put the chart below up and that should make the headline. The numbers don’t lie and what’s really depressing about this data is the fact that Meta may be completely giving up on any significant silicon or hardware development. The company may just be looking to shift headsets and reduce costs.
There’s nothing to indicate that Mark Zuckerberg’s commitment to cut costs and be more prudent have made a dent in his pursuit of some sort of metaverse Holy Grail for the company. And if you look at the totality of Meta’s performance, and compare the couple of hundred million dollars it has made from Reality Labs apps and products compare to the $34 billion from everything else,, you have to wonder what gives? What are we, mere mortals, not seeing?
| Meta | Three Months Ended | |||||||||||||||||
| Sep 30, | Dec 31, | Mar 31, | Jun 30, | Sep 30, | Dec 31, | Mar 31, | Jun 30, | Sep 30, | ||||||||||
| 2021 | 2021 | 2022 | 2022 | 2022 | 2022 | 2023 | 2023 | 2023 | ||||||||||
| Revenue | $29,010 | $33,671 | $27,908 | $28,822 | $27,714 | $32,165 | $28,645 | $31,999 | $34,146 | |||||||||
| Costs and expenses: | ||||||||||||||||||
| Cost of revenue | 5,771 | 6,348 | 6,005 | 5,192 | 5,716 | 8,336 | 6,108 | 5,945 | 6,210 | |||||||||
| Research and development | 6,316 | 7,046 | 7,707 | 8,690 | 9,170 | 9,771 | 9,381 | 9,344 | 9,241 | |||||||||
| Marketing and sales | 3,554 | 4,387 | 3,312 | 3,595 | 3,780 | 4,574 | 3,044 | 3,154 | 2,877 | |||||||||
| General and administrative | 2,946 | 3,305 | 2,360 | 2,987 | 3,384 | 3,085 | 2,885 | 4,164 | 2,070 | |||||||||
| Total costs and expenses | 18,587 | 21,086 | 19,384 | 20,464 | 22,050 | 25,766 | 21,418 | 22,607 | 20,398 | |||||||||
| Income from operations | 10,423 | 12,585 | 8,524 | 8,358 | 5,664 | 6,399 | 7,227 | 9,392 | 13,748 | |||||||||
| Interest and other income (expense), net | 142 | 117 | 384 | -172 | -88 | -250 | 80 | -99 | 272 | |||||||||
| Income before provision for income taxes | 10,565 | 12,702 | 8,908 | 8,186 | 5,576 | 6,149 | 7,307 | 9,293 | 14,020 | |||||||||
| Provision for income taxes | 1,371 | 2,417 | 1,443 | 1,499 | 1,181 | 1,497 | 1,598 | 1,505 | 2,437 | |||||||||
| Net income | $9,194 | $10,285 | $7,465 | $6,687 | $4,395 | $4,652 | $5,709 | $7,788 | $11,583 | |||||||||
