With President’s Day a memory and Memorial Day still months away, the time for deeply discounted electronics is kind of a long shot. But don’t tell that to Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META), which plans to launch a substantial price drop on two of its best virtual reality headsets.
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the reasoning clear: he wants more people to get into virtual reality and, by extension, the Metaverse. Therefore, he’s going to lower the price to get the equipment—or rather, some of the equipment—required to make such a move happen. With the price cuts in place, the Quest 2 256-gigabyte model will drop to $429, while the Quest Pro will drop to $999. Some have already posited that this move is a good plan to get rid of excess inventory. However, there are no signs of any follow-up hardware coming any time soon.
That, in turn, casts doubt on the excess inventory concept. Worse, Meta’s pricing on its VR line is nothing short of baffling. For instance, the 128-gigabyte version of the Quest 2 isn’t getting any price cut; rather, it got a price hike back in August. But with the 256GB price cut, it now costs about $30 more than the 128GB version. This comes in the wake of huge layoffs, so it’s easy to wonder how much of this is a move to draw interest and how much of it is sheer desperation.
Regardless of the bizarre pricing schemes, analysts are very much in favor of Meta. Analyst consensus calls it a Strong Buy, with 35 analysts offering Buy recommendations against six Holds and two Sells. Meta stock also offers 16.17% upside potential thanks to its average price target of $215.20.
