On June 22, Tianfeng International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said on Twitter that Meta’s Metaverse hardware headset business has slowed down, with shipment forecasts reduced by 40% and all new headsets/AR after 2024 postponed. /MR hardware project.

author | Song Wanxin

editor | Pan Xinyi

cover source | Visual China

Meta The "awakening time" of the Metaverse came a bit suddenly.

On June 22, Tianfeng International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo stated on Twitter that Meta’s Metaverse hardware headset business has slowed down, with shipment forecasts reduced by 40%, while all new headsets after 2024 have been postponed. /AR/MR hardware projects.

Source: Ming-Chi Kuo’s Twitter

Meta’s stock price was stable that day and was not affected by the comments. It only fell slightly by 0.76%. However, the chain effect transmitted to the consumer electronics industry chain caused the market to wail. Goertek shares responded fell to the limit , Luxshare Precision also fell by more than 5%.

Although Ming-Chi Kuo later that day revised his forecast for shipment volume down to 25%-35%, and Goertek also refuted the rumors, saying that the company's operations and cooperation were normal, the company's stock price continued to fall by 4.4% on the 23rd.

At the end of a technology cycle, the breakthrough nodes brought by leading manufacturers such as Meta, , Apple , etc. are still full of unknowns. Before the dividends of the new cycle arrive, scenes such as "Oculus cuts production and Goertek falls" will only continue to play out.

What happened to Oculus

After the first VR craze faded from 2016 to 2018, the Oculus Quest 2 released in September 2020 almost single-handedly changed the market situation of insufficient VR hardware ownership.

Quest 2 is priced at US$299. The original intention is to seize market share with ultra-high cost performance among products with the same configuration. Fueled by the epidemic, Quest 2 sales successfully exceeded the "singularity" Zuckerberg called 10 million units at the end of last year. This number is five times that of the previous generation Quest.

In the next year, Meta has fully opened up its sales speed and intensity, and Oculus’ market share accounts for 80% of the overall VR market.

However, the good times did not last long. Steam data shows that since the beginning of this year, the proportion of Oculus Quest 2 users jumped from 39% to 46% in January this year. It only increased by 2% in May this year, and the number of users in April and May Volume was flat with little growth.

Source: Steam platform

At the same time, the repeated difficulties in producing new products have left Meta’s VR hardware in limbo. Among the four major VR headset series announced by Meta, Cambria was originally planned to be launched at the end of last year, but due to the impact of supply chain production capacity and research and development progress, it is expected to be postponed to September this year. Whether the new product will be released as scheduled in September this year has now become a question. unknown.

According to The Information, since 2022, Meta has not only given up on building a new VR operating system framework, but its self-developed processor is not as good as the Qualcomm XR 2 processor. means that it is difficult for Meta to open a large gap with domestic and foreign VR head display manufacturers such as Pico, HTC, and Lynx based on the hardware of VR equipment.

Judging from Meta’s investment, the VR business will continue to be stagnant for some time. In May of this year, a Meta spokesperson stated that the company planned to reduce Reality Labs’ expenses, including slowing down personnel recruitment and halting or delaying the implementation of some projects.

Reality Labs is the core department that carries Meta’s business. According to financial report data, from 2019 to 2021, the operating losses of Reality Labs business were US$4.503 billion, US$6.623 billion, and US$10.193 billion respectively, with losses of more than US$20 billion in three years, and Losses continue to expand. In just two years of

, the trend of " metaverse " has rapidly expanded, attracting a large number of followers, and has been quickly falsified by and .

Steam data shows that as of May this year, the penetration rate of VR headsets on the Steam platform and was only 3.24%. In other words, even from a global perspective, the VR hardware market size of is still in its early stages, and each manufacturer can only make a fuss about the cake that is not big enough.

“VR will still be mainly about games for a long time, and social networking is also game-oriented, so it is unlikely to break the circle.” The aforementioned entrepreneur also pointed out that “(popularization) may take at least another five years, and AR may Faster, but still based on traditional terminals, products in the form of glasses will not be popular on the C side in a short time. "

" Metaverse" may not necessarily be Zuckerberg's dream, but it must be regarded as Facebook breaking the ceiling. rare opportunity.

is in the testing stage, and this kind of bet is inevitably accompanied by risks. "Meta's previous expectations for VR should exceed the scope of games, such as collaboration, education, shopping, etc." A former VR hardware entrepreneur told 36氪 that Meta is very likely to have expectations during the implementation of subsequent products. Difference.

"There is currently a lack of high-quality content, and the comprehensive experience of software and hardware integration is average. I see too many product problems now, and the (VR hardware) market size will not be larger than switch." The person added.

Success comes with nothing, failure comes with nothing

Looking back at Zuckerberg’s entry into the metaverse, Oculus is more like Zuckerberg’s only bet to save the company’s decline than the grand blueprint and ambition of the metaverse.

"At that time, Xiao Zha felt that after acquiring Oculus for so long, it was time for it to make a contribution. In addition, he felt that in the current ecological environment, if you want to survive, you must become an upstream, and Facebook is the most downstream and can easily be killed by Apple, so Decided to become an upstream player in the metaverse,” , a former Facebook employee told 36Kr.

Zuckerberg once said that the Metaverse business will not have a return within ten years, and during this period, the income of the application family will need to be transfused to Reality Labs. But unfortunately, judging from the performance of recent quarters, Meta's "money printing machine" has almost stalled.

’s financial report for the first quarter of this year showed that Meta’s net profit fell again after the fourth quarter of last year, recording $7.465 billion, a year-on-year decrease of 21%. In addition to the losses invested in the Metaverse, the decline of the old cash cow was also one of the reasons. According to

data, the Meta application family’s net revenue in the first quarter was US$11.5 billion, a year-on-year decrease of 12.8% and a month-on-month decrease of 27.7%. In the fourth quarter of last year, Facebook MAU dropped to 2.91 billion for the first time quarter-on-quarter. After this point, social business growth has become increasingly difficult. This largely contributed to Zuckerberg's decision to shrink Reality Labs.

is bounded by VR hardware. On one side are Internet giants like Meta, and on the other side are the "goers" who "work" for big manufacturers.

is deeply bound to its head customers, falling in love and killing each other, which has always been the norm for domestic electronics OEMs. 's profits and losses come from the same source. A slight disturbance from the head customer can often cause a collective collapse of the foundry.

is similar to Meta's concerns about Apple. There is another voice that makes Goertek anxious: practitioners are waiting for Apple's hardware.

An investment and financing source from an AR manufacturer said that in addition to Apple’s brand effect and helping to popularize VR, many people believe that the product technology path launched by Apple will be the mainstream technology path.

"AR glasses are still in a state of contention. The product appearance and technical solutions are not completely determined. The three brands may use three different optical display solutions, and the technology of VR equipment is also slowly iterating. Once Apple chooses certain technologies path will be a major benefit to the companies involved in this technology line,” the person said.

At the end of last year, Ming-Chi Kuo also made a prediction: Apple has begun planning the second generation of AR/MR headsets, which are expected to be shipped in the second half of 2024, and their initial exclusive NPI (new product introduction) supplier is " Luxshare Precision, the leader of "Fruit Chain". 's "Ten billions per word" was staged again. Luxshare Precision rose 6.19% that day. Although as of the 2021 mid-term report, Luxshare Precision's VR/VR products have not yet contributed to revenue. The same rising logic of

can also be applied to Goertek. In 2020, after Goertek won the exclusive contract to manufacture Oculus headsets, Goertek's stock price rose by half again in a year, and it also helped Goertek transform into VR hardware when smartphones were at their peak.

's past financial reports show that VR hardware is classified into the "smart hardware" category by Goertek. The revenue brought by the smart hardware segment to Goertek has increased from 6.627 billion yuan in 2018 to 32.809 billion yuan in 2021, surpassing it for the first time last year. Developed the “intelligent acoustic machine” business including Airpods. Judging from the revenue share of

, smart hardware increased to 50% in the first quarter of this year, becoming Goertek's largest revenue pillar, which naturally plays a decisive role in Goertek's valuation logic in the secondary market.

Although the overall development of the VR industry is in its early stages, the sensitivity of the transmission to the industry chain is very high. Essence Securities pointed out that the proportion of domestic B-side shipments is significantly higher than that of the C-side. Last year, B-side hardware headsets accounted for more than 70%, and the share of C-side shipments has further shrunk.

This also means that once the market’s digestion capacity is insufficient, the order cancellation incident will no longer be an isolated case, but some investors are more optimistic about this.

has a point of view. Judging from Steam data in May, VR headset monthly activity accounted for a record high and the single-month growth rate was the fastest, but only Oculus’s growth rate slowed down. If Ming-Chi Kuo’s prediction is true, it may be due to competition. The sales structure is adjusted, but Goertek has a near monopoly on major brands such as Oculus, Sony, and Pico, so the impact will not be too great.

However, market sentiment has cast a cruel vote. Since the beginning of the year, Goertek's stock price has halved from a high of 58 yuan to 33 yuan, erasing last year's gains and returning to the level of 2020.