Facebook Parent Meta to Change Stock Ticker Symbol on 9 June

Meta, the Facebook-parent company, announced Tuesday that it will change its stock ticker symbol to “META” prior to the market opening on June 9.

The company changed its name from Facebook last October, noting that it would change its stock ticker to “MVRS,” effective December 1. However, the company revealed that it was delaying the change to the first quarter of 2022.

At that time, CEO Mark Zuckerberg was interested in building out the metaverse, a sci-fi term that entails working and playing in a virtual world.

Meta said that no action by the company’s shareholders is required with respect to the ticker symbol change.

Last April, Zuckerberg expected that around five billion people will enter the metaverse space by 2030.

Zuckerberg aims to change his company’s future through the metaverse project, describing it as an “embodied internet”. The platform will contribute to the world’s economy from $8trillion to $13trillion in eight years.

“We believe the metaverse may be the next generation of the internet — combining the physical and digital world in a persistent and immersive manner — and not purely a virtual reality world,” Citi report indicated. “A device-agnostic metaverse accessible via PCs, game consoles, and smartphones could result in a very large ecosystem.”

However, experts warn that the metaverse will “attract great scrutiny from global regulators and policymakers”, citing content moderation, free speech, and privacy as some of the big concerns.