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Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, demonstrates the Meta Quest Pro during the virtual Meta Connect event in New York on Oct. 11, 2022.

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Meta continues to sink billions of dollars a quarter into developing the metaverse, and is just now facing its first real competitive threat from Apple.

In its fourth-quarter earnings report Thursday, Meta said its Reality Labs unit recorded an operating loss in the period of $4.65 billion. Analysts were expecting a loss of $4.26 billion, according to StreetAccount.

The metaverse division has now lost more than $42 billion since the end of 2020, the first quarter for which numbers are available publicly. The fourth-quarter loss was its biggest yet.

“We expect operating losses to increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and our investments to further scale our ecosystem,” the company said in its earnings statement.

Revenue within Reality Labs was more than $1 billion in the fourth quarter, up from $727 million in the same period a year earlier. Analysts polled by StreetAccount were expecting revenue of $768.2 million. Meta debuted its Quest 3 VR headset last fall.

Reality Labs develops the virtual reality and augmented reality technologies underpinning the metaverse, which Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has called the “next frontier” and the “successor to the mobile internet.” The current centerpiece for the business is the Quest family of VR headsets.

As Meta pours money into the metaverse, Apple is hitting the market with its first headset. Apple’s Vision Pro goes on sale Friday and will cost $3,500, significantly more than Meta’s Quest 3 VR headset, which has a starting price of $500.

Sales of VR and AR headsets and glasses dropped almost 40% in 2023 to $664 million in 2023, as of Nov. 25, according to research firm Circana. An analyst at Circana told CNBC that the steep drop was likely due to a lack of new stand-alone VR headsets.

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Alibaba says smart car spinoff Banma plans to list shares in Hong Kong

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Alibaba says smart car spinoff Banma plans to list shares in Hong Kong

Alibaba’s global headquarters in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China, on May 9, 2024.

Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Alibaba-backed Banma, a provider of technology for smart cars, is planning to list shares on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, according to a filing.

In a filing dated Aug. 21, Alibaba said it currently owns about 45% of Banma and will continue to control over 30% of the company’s stock after the listing. Banma said in a filing that the announcement does not guarantee a listing will take place.

Banma, founded in 2015 and based in Shanghai, is “principally engaged in the development of smart cockpit solutions,” Alibaba’s filing says. In March, Alibaba announced that it was deepening its partnership with BMW in China, building an artificial intelligence engine for cars with a solution built by Banma, “Alibaba’s intelligent cockpit solution provider.”

In addition to Alibaba, Banma is backed by investors including China’s SAIC Motor, SDIC Investment Management and Yunfeng Capital, a Chinese investment firm started by Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma.

Alibaba in the past referred to Banma as a joint venture “between us and SAIC Motor.”

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These little robots are changing the way solar farms are built, saving time and money

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These little robots are changing the way solar farms are built, saving time and money

Clean energy gets a robot boost

Private renewable energy projects are still moving forward despite a pullback in government support, and new technology is making that construction more efficient.

Solar farms, for example, take meticulous planning and surveying, involve long hours and require significant labor. Now, robots are taking on the job.

CivDot is a four-wheeled robot that can mark up to 3,000 layout points per day and is accurate within 8 millimeters. The machine can ride over rugged terrain and work through rough weather.

It is the brainchild of California-based Civ Robotics.

“Our secret sauce and our core technology is actually in the navigation and the geospatial — being able to literally mark coordinates within less than a quarter inch, which is very, very difficult in an uneven terrain, outdoor surfaces, and out in the desert,” said Tom Yeshurun, CEO of Civ Robotics.

The data for manual surveying is uploaded into the Civ software, then the operator chooses the area they want to mark and presses go. The robot does the rest, saving both time and money.

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“The manual surveying equipment, if you use that in the field and you have three crews, they will need three land surveying handheld receivers. That alone is already equal to how much we lease our machines in the field, and all the labor savings is just another benefit,” Yeshurun said.

Civ Robotics has more than 100 of these robots in the field that are primarily being used by renewable energy companies, but they are also used in oil and gas. It is currently working with Bechtel Corporation on several solar projects.

“These were usually pretty highly paid field engineers that we would send out there, and they might be able to do 250 or 350 pile marks a day. With the CivDot robot, we’re able to do about 1250 a day,” said Kelley Brown, vice president at Bechtel.

Brown said the company has used the robot in thick and muddy terrain in Texas and out in the deserts of Nevada.

“And so you have to think about things like the tires, or you may have to think about clearance. Are you trying to get over existing brush and such, across the solar field? So that’s one thing that we contemplate. I think the other is, you know, this runs on batteries, so you’ve got to contemplate battery swaps,” she added.

Civ Robotics is backed by Alleycorp, FF Venture Capital, Bobcat Company, Newfund Capital, Trimble Ventures, and Converge. Total VC funding to date is $12.5 million.

There are other robotics solutions for markings, but the competition is mostly doing work on highways and soccer fields. Yeshurun said those rivals can’t handle the terrains that the solar industry faces as it expands into new territories.

 CNBC producer Lisa Rizzolo contributed to this piece.

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Sony raises PlayStation 5 prices in U.S. as tariffs start to hit

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Sony raises PlayStation 5 prices in U.S. as tariffs start to hit

The PlayStation DualSense controller and PlayStation 5 console.

Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images

PlayStation 5 game consoles will cost $50 more in the U.S. starting this week, Sony announced on Wednesday.

The price for an entry-level PlayStation 5 Digital Edition will increase from $450 to $500, and a PlayStation 5 with a disc drive is going up to $550 from $500. Sony’s high-end PlayStation 5 Pro will cost $750, up from $700. The PlayStation 5 was first released in 2020.

President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff plan announced in April went into effect earlier this month on most countries. The U.S. currently has a 30% tariff on imports from China, and higher tariffs on goods from the world’s second-largest economy are currently “paused,” according to the administration. Sony’s home country of Japan was hit with a 15% tariff.

While Sony didn’t attribute the increase to Trump’s tariffs, consumer companies have been warning for months that higher prices are on the way.

“Similar to many global businesses, we continue to navigate a challenging economic environment,” Sony said in its blog post.

The company said that retail prices for console accessories such as controllers haven’t changed.

Earlier this month, Sony officials said the company was working on supply chain diversification to combat U.S. tariffs, and said that the console hardware it sells in the U.S. is produced outside of China.

“It is difficult to speak to our hardware pricing strategy as that has implications for our future competitive strategy,” ” Sony officials said, according to a translated transcript of a call with financial analysts posted on its website. “But we intend to take a flexible approach to such decision-making by monitoring consumer price sensitivity as we think about total full-year segment profits, lifetime value, manufacturing, units sold in, and our content sales potential.”

In May, Microsoft raised the price of its Xbox video game consoles. Nintendo delayed pre-orders of its Switch 2 by a few weeks in April, attributing the delay to tariffs. Although Nintendo did not raise the price of its new consoles, it hiked the price of the original Switch earlier this month.

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