On December 01, 2022, Facebook (FB) will be rebranded to be known as Meta (MVRS).  The announcement about the name change was made during the Facebook Connect Augmented and Virtual Reality Conference.

MVRS implies Metaverse and this just makes it very obvious that the social media giant is professing big ambitions than just being a social media brand.

Zuckerberg unveiled that new name of “Meta” and on Monday the company announced that it was going to be spending 10 billion dollars on Metaverse cost just this year alone.

CNBC:  When do you think these investments in Metaverse are going to start paying off?  At what point do you see Facebook Reality Labs and your work on the Metaverse starting to yield revenue and profits?

Vishal Shah Facebook Metaverse VP:  It is important to look in to that these are very much long-term investments.  We made it clear on the call this week that over the next couple of years we are making some fundamental investments on the hardware side and the software side.

The Metaverse vision for us is a 5, 10, 15-year journey. So, we expect why these investments are important and why we are calling them out as significant.  The return from a business perspective may still be a few years out.  It is still important for us to get started on them now.

CNBC:  So, a few years out, I mean Zuckerberg said you are going to be selling the VR Headsets art at cost.  Are we talking about continuing to invest, tens and billions of dollars a year for the next 10 years or is there a path to profitability in the next decade?  Can you give us a sense of that time line?

Well, it is hard to put a specific timeline again.  I think, it is important to know, one of the reasons we felt it is important to call this out from a segment perspective is that for sometime now, Facebook now Meta has been more than just a Facebook App. And, people were confused about that name, because the company name and the product name was the same.  We have had those family of apps for quite some time and them we are ready to invest on the hardware side whether it is in VR or AR feature platforms.  It is important to call out.  So, these are long term investments.  Our core business continues to be very important. I used to work on Instagram and that is a very important investment that continues for us as a company while we build a platform for the future.