Facebook Inc, the corporate entity that owns the social media network, will be rebranded as Meta in order to focus on building the metaverse business, a shared virtual environment that will be the successor to the mobile internet.
The name of the social media network will continue to be Facebook. Hence, Meta will own Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc. This is similar to Alphabet Inc owns Google, Google Cloud, YouTube, etc.
What’s Meta? Mark Zuckerberg explains in a letter
Facebook earlier announced it will be spending $10 billion for building the metaverse business
The world’s largest social media company battles criticisms from lawmakers and regulators over its market power, algorithmic decisions and the policing of abuses on its services.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, speaking at the company’s live-streamed virtual and augmented reality conference, said the new name reflected its work investing in the metaverse, rather than its namesake social media service, which will continue to be called Facebook.
“Right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything that we’re doing today, let alone in the future,” said Zuckerberg.
The company, which has invested heavily in augmented and virtual reality, said the change would bring together its different apps and technologies under one new brand. It said it would not change its corporate structure.
The tech giant, which reports about 2.9 billion monthly users, has faced increasing scrutiny in recent years from global lawmakers and regulators.
The company said in a blog post that it intends to start trading under the new stock ticker it has reserved, MVRS, on Dec. 1. On Thursday, it unveiled a new sign at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California, replacing its thumbs-up Like logo with a blue infinity shape.
Facebook said this week that its hardware division Facebook Reality Labs, which is responsible for AR and VR efforts, would become a separate reporting unit and that its investment in it would reduce this year’s total operating profit by about $10 billion.
This year, the company created a product team in this unit focused on the metaverse and it recently announced plans to hire 10,000 employees in Europe over the next five years to work on the effort.
In 2015, Google reorganized to create a holding company called Alphabet Inc, as the popular search engine broke into new fields such as self-driving cars, high-speed broadband and expanded its cloud business. Snapchat also rebranded to Snap Inc in 2016, the same year it launched its first pair of smart glasses.
