Meta is returning to its roots somewhere in the metaverse.

Sources told the Financial Times that Meta is planning to expand its partnership with Ray-Ban to make glasses with a little display on the inside, so users can gaze out at the world with a digital overlay — Terminator style. It’s a sign that Meta, having set aside its big metaverse ambitions for a while to ride the generative AI wave, is turning back to futuristic hardware.

My Glasses, I Can’t See My Texts Without My Glasses

Meta’s collaboration with Ray-Ban’s parent company kicked off in October 2021, exactly as Meta was rebranding itself from Facebook and saying it was going to become a metaverse company, distancing itself from its core social media business. Meta released a second generation of its Ray-Ban smart glasses at the tail-end of last year, and they let wearers control their phone through audio commands (basically Siri but on your face) and record video using the cameras mounted in the frames.

These features don’t quite get us to what purists might consider a metaverse product, which typically involves some degree of virtual reality or a melding of the digital with the real world. Sources told the FT that Meta wants to take the glasses a step closer to something like the ones that famously framed Tom Cruise in Minority Report:

• The sources said Meta wants to add a screen on the inside of the glasses that would be able to flash things like text messages, and that the product might be ready to hit the shelves as early as the second half of next year.
• Reality Labs, the part of Meta that makes its hardware products, is still something of a cash-burner for the company, posting a $4.4 billion loss in the third quarter of this year. Reality Labs’ total losses since the company started accounting for them separately in 2020 stand at $54.9 billion.

Knock, Knock: While Meta reconnects with its metaverse heritage, Apple is reportedly looking to break ground on a whole new product category. The iPhone maker, which had its own foray into metaverse products with the Vision Pro VR headset this year, is looking into making a smart doorbell alongside a range of other smart-home products, according to a Bloomberg report.

Lego has built its success brick by brick. The rest of the toy industry is looking a bit like Wheezy from Toy Story 2. 

CNBC reported Monday that Lego has significantly outperformed its toy-making peers, which have mostly had a decidedly un-fun year, in 2024. There are two big ingredients to the company’s success: a wide-ranging clutch of licensing deals, and finding ways to sell Lego sets to kids well over the age of 30. 

Surviving Kidulthood

Recent years have seen an uptick in adult consumers buying toys not for their children, niblings, and younger loved ones, but for themselves. According to data published by analysis firm Circana in November, while toy sales overall are down 3% compared with last year — the third year in a row that sales declined — the portion of those sales which involve grown-ups buying for themselves is growing. Per Circana, 20% of toys bought are now intended for an owner over the age of 18.

James Zahn, editor in chief of The Toy Book, told CNBC that Lego has been ahead of the curve on this particular consumer trend. “Lego embraced adults, long before we started saying ‘kidults,’ and they’ve managed to continue that in new ways,” Zahn said:

• Grown-ups made up 20% of Lego’s sales as early as 2021, according to The Wall Street Journal.
• Lego has aggressively pushed into finding new ways to market itself to adults, ranging from $850 sets of the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars to influencer-friendly $50 bouquets of Lego “flowers” to build as romantic gifts.

For the Emperor: Lego isn’t the only company soaring on the backs of adult hobbyists. Games Workshop, the UK-based company behind the popular Warhammer games — in which players buy little fantasy or sci-fi figurines at great personal expense, paint them, and then battle them against rival players — has managed to land itself on the FTSE 100 after a stellar year for its share price. It’s one of the few pandemic darlings that actually managed to pull itself out of a post-covid slump. Like Lego, that’s partly due to the strength of its licensing deals: This month, the company sealed a potentially very lucrative deal with Amazon, which wants to make a Warhammer TV series starring former Man of Steel Henry Cavill.

Are you ready for the Hondissaince? Or is it the Nissondaissance?

Spurred by “the rise of Chinese power,” Japanese automakers Honda and Nissan announced Monday that they are in talks to merge. A successful agreement would see the creation of the world’s third-largest automaker and lay the groundwork for a plan to “fight back” against the competition that Honda CEO Toshihiro Mibe said would be in place by 2030. Off to the races.

In It for the Long Haul

Mibe emphasized that this is no short trek. Honda and Nissan would, if all goes as planned, merge their operations under a joint holding company. Honda, which would contribute $43 billion to the combined $54 billion market cap based on current valuations, would head up the new management. But executives expect discussions to run until June 2025 and a listing of the new entity on the Tokyo Stock Exchange would not happen until August 2026.

“The chance of this not being implemented is not zero,” said Mibe, who said a merger would be a complex medium-to-long term project that would start to yield significant results in years, not months. Then there’s the matter of Nissan, which has struggled of late:

• Nissan reported a $61 million loss in the third quarter, followed by an announcement that it was laying off 9,000 people and reducing its global production capacity by a fifth. To ward off the suggestion that Honda was pulling too much weight, Mibe noted the merger will be “based on the assumption that Nissan completes its turnaround.”
• Honda made a net profit of $3.25 billion in the first half of its current fiscal year, a 20% decline from a year earlier. One major culprit was China sales, which fell 29% in its July to September quarter. Nissan has similarly struggled in the Middle Kingdom, with a 14.3% drop in China sales in the first half of the fiscal year.

The “fight back” plan Mibe alluded to would address Honda and Nissan’s eroding China market share, with both ceding ground to popular electric vehicles, hybrids and plug-in hybrids made by Chinese brands like AIC Motor, FAW Group, BAIC Motor, and Dongfeng Motor.

Three’s Company: The merger could end up forming something of a triumvirate of well-known brands, as it may also include Mitsubishi. Nissan is the top shareholder of the Outlander-maker, which has been invited to join the new group — the timeline for that decision is the end of January. Honda’s US-listed shares rose over 12% Monday, in a pre-Christmas gift for the Civic-maker’s shareholders.