"We regularly re-evaluate our talent pipeline according
to our business needs and in light of the expense guidance given for this
earnings period, we are slowing its growth accordingly," a Meta
spokesperson said in an e-mailed statement.
Business Insider, citing an internal note to employees,
reported that the company was lowering hiring targets and had temporarily
stopped hiring for the remainder of the year.
Meta Platforms last week recorded its slowest revenue growth
in a decade, with Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg also saying the
company would scale back costs.
Meanwhile, Meta Platforms on Wednesday gave an early glimpse
of its first physical store, which features a floor-to-ceiling screen for
showing off games on its virtual reality headsets and rooms for testing video
calling devices.
The store, set to open on May 9, is located at the main
campus for Meta's Reality Labs unit, in the Silicon Valley town of Burlingame,
California. The unit is developing the hardware products the company aims to
sell there, including Ray-Ban smart glasses, Portal video-calling devices and
Oculus VR headsets.
In the meantime, with growth slowing and the company still
almost entirely reliant on digital ads for revenue, Meta is cutting back on
some of its long-term investments.
In addition to promoting its hardware devices to consumers,
Meta is increasingly pitching them to businesses. It gave a demonstration at
the store of conference calls that can feature a mix of virtual reality avatars
and traditional video calling.
The company is experimenting with augmented reality
technology that would enable users to join conferences as avatars via Portal,
without donning headsets, said Micah Collins, a director of product management
working on the enterprise tools.
Collins acknowledged the enterprise metaverse business is
nascent, and a spokesperson said most usage of Horizon Workrooms, the VR
conferencing technology, comes from inside Meta.
Still, Collins said, the company senses opportunity.
Although many products are still very early stage and known
in their consumer context, "there's enough there that's giving us a lot of
confidence to attack the space," he said. © Reuters
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