Oculus Rift Virtual Reality Headset Starts Shipping In March

The social media network's Oculus Rift's major deals have surfaced the tech world, finally and will be in the hands of customers by March of 2016.

On Wednesday, the social media giant announced that it will be taking pre-orders for its much anticipated Oculus Virtual Reality headset. When the announcement came out of the launch of the product, the two most important aspects were not specified; these included price and availability, however the company has finally disclosed these details as well.

The shipping will start from March and the Rift is priced at $599. Any pre-order that currently takes place has been given a delivery date somewhere in April. The order includes the Rift Headset, an Xbox One Controller, Two games, Oculus Remote and a sensor. It is essential to highlight that just the Rift is for $599 whereas to make it working properly the use will require to purchase a high-end gaming PC which is able to work with Rift.

According to a number of analysts, the sales of the latest virtual reality could be as low as hundreds – thousands while some experts are expecting it to be above 1 million. On the other hand, a whole lot of people have decline to present estimates as they believe this is not a big deal for Facebook, Inc.

One of the analysts who refused to estimate the sales of the product, Brian Wieser, analyst at Pivotal Research stated that the launch was this product would just be a rounding error inside of Facebook at this point in time. Additionally, another analyst from Piper Jaffray, Gene Munster stated that it is a “non-event in 2016” and is also expecting the company to sell a few units of the product at a loss.

However, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of the social media network, believe that the headgear will be more popular amongst hardcore gamers, during its initial quarter and then go from there. For the first quarter, at least, they have kept the bar quite low for the latest product. According to estimations by Nvidia Corporation, the purchase of over 13 million PCs worldwide next year would be sufficient enough to run the VR provided it has the graphics capabilities.

According to MarketsandMarkets, the virtual reality market will be worth as much as $16 billion. Even though the start seems to be quite low for the Oculus Rift but the future seems quite bright for the virtual reality device. Facebook is not the only company that is working on getting a share from the pie of the lucrative market; many others are directing their resources towards developing this technology as well including Alphabet, Inc., Google Glass and Microsoft’s HoloLens.

Facebook Stock Witnesses Decline In Stock

Facebook, Inc. Tries To Take Over YouTube's Market; Witnesses Decline In Stock

The social network giant Facebook, Inc. since the last twelve months is trying to take over YouTube’s market, which makes up for most of the users who view videos on the internet. Currently, YouTube has dominance over the video views on the internet but thesocial media giant has been desperately making efforts to overcome that.

In a search conducted by Sandvine, a network company, the yearly internet usage of the video streaming website has grown from 14% to 17.9% while the social media network’s yearly usage has gone down from 3% to 2.5%. On Monday, the stock of the social media website was being traded at $105.61 with a loss of -0.54%.

The trading session held on Monday closed at a loss of 0.54%; Facebook stock throughout the session kept fluctuating between $104.66 and $106.83, with the former being the lowest at which the stock was seen at and the latter being the highest. Towards the end of the session, the shares of the company that were being traded were 15,474,890 shares. The outstanding shares of Facebook are 2,827,994, 100 shares with the current market capitalization of $298,664.

In the last twelve months, the highest level to which the share price was witnessed at was $110.65 and a low level of $72. A number of analysts, during this time, have commented on Facebook stocks one of which was a research and financial services firm, Argus Research. The research company has maintained its rating of the shares of the company at Buy. However Argus Research has raised the target price of the social media site’s shares to $130 from an initial target price of $115 per share.

As for gaining the video internet market, in comparison to Hulu, Netflix and Amazon, Facebook is still pretty far behind. On the other hand, the company has received a rating of Buy by stock experts at Rosenblatt Securities, research and financial services firm, as per the reports of MarketBeat. The target price that the research firm is estimated for the stock of the social media company is $125 which indicates an incline of 18.36% from the shares present price per share.

The earnings per share for the current quarter of fiscal year 2015 were reported by the company on November 4, 2015 of $0.57 which in comparison to the estimated EPS by analysts shows a difference of $0.05. As per the estimations of analysts the EPS of the company was supposed to be $0.52. Analysts had predicted that the company would report earnings of $4.36 million but the company for the quarter reported earnings of $4.50 million.

In the same quarter in the previous fiscal year (2014), the social company had recorded earnings per share of $0.43 with an increase in its earnings of 40.4% on an annual basis.