According to the information obtained from the Zhitong Finance APP, renowned Tianfeng analyst Guo Mingji wrote an article stating that the hardware business of META (META.US), the head-mounted device (metaverse), may incur higher losses than market consensus due to weak demand. According to Guo Mingji's latest survey, the shipment volume of META's head-mounted devices/metaverse hardware has continued to decline significantly, so the downsizing of the head-mounted device/metaverse business has limited help in improving losses.
Guo Mingji pointed out that the initial shipment estimate for Quest 3 was expected to exceed 7 million units in 2H23, but due to weak demand expectations, the current shipment estimate for the second half of this year is 2-2.5 million units, and the shipment volume in 2024 is about 1 million units. The shipment volume of the Quest series is expected to further decline by about 50% YoY to 3.5 million units in 2023, and there may still be a YoY decline in shipment volume in 2024.
Guo Mingji also stated that even with improvements in specifications/functionality as selling points, the estimated total shipment volume for the entire lifecycle of the new Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses is only about 1.5 million units, which is lower than the initial shipment target of 2 million units for the previous generation Ray-Ban Stories Smart Glasses. However, it is worth noting that the final shipment volume of Ray-Ban Stories Smart Glasses was only about 300-400 thousand units, significantly lower than expected, and the actual number of active users was even lower than 50 thousand.

Guo Mingchi: META's hardware losses in the metaverse may be higher than market consensus.