Meta, the parent company of Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp has announced that it is changing its stock ticker symbol from “FB” to “META” prior to the market opening on 9 June 2022.
The company changed its name from Facebook to Meta Platform in October last year in a rebrand that focuses on building the “metaverse”, a shared virtual environment that it bets will be the successor to the mobile Internet.
The “FB” stock ticker has been in use since 2012. But at the time of the name change, the company reported said it would change its stock ticker to “MVRS,” which was supposed to have taken effect as of 1 December 2021. However, it said later in November that the change would be delayed until the first quarter of 2022.
But now the company has opted to replace “FB” with “META” and completely ignored the previous plan to change to “MVRS”, which represented Metaverse.
The Verge reported that the name change from Facebook to Meta (Metaverse) hasn’t been enough for all the investors to chip in on Zuckerberg’s idea of the metaverse, a virtual world in which users can interact with a computer-generated environment and other users. Some investors are still skeptical.
Current and former employees alleged that Zuckerberg is so focused on the metaverse that he is not interested in anything else. The tech giant employees claim that the internet entrepreneur lacks a coherent strategy to carry the project through.
“Now, Meta is moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology,” the company said.
