Bytedance sells 46,000 VR glasses in China

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Bytedance wants to sell one million units of the Pico 4 worldwide. Interest in the home market seems to be rather weak.

The VR headset went on sale on September 27 and generated 46,000 online orders by October 14, 18 days. This is what the market research company Sandalwood Advisors, which specializes in China, writes.

Online mail order companies JD.com and Alibaba’s T-Mall accounted for 65 and 17 percent of orders respectively, and another 17 percent for Bytedance’s Douyin app, the Chinese TikTok counterpart.

Pico 4 costs converted in China 350 and 400 euros, depending on memory equipment (128 or 256 GB). This puts the device below the average Chinese smartphone price (420 euros), which makes the VR headset “more acceptable to consumers,” according to the market research institute’s report.

Pico has high expectations

Sales are well below the target set by Pico President Henry Zhou. In a group interview with Chinese media in September, Zhou said that sales expectations are at over a million devices lie. Zhou probably means worldwide sales.

At this point it’s unclear how long Pico 4 will remain on the market and when the headset will be replaced by a newer model. The world’s best-selling VR headset MetaQuest 2 is not available in China.

The Hong Kong daily South Morning China Post reported on the sales figures. Pico owner Bytedance did not respond to an inquiry about the scope of offline orders for Pico 4.

The company should now look closely at sales in other countries: the headset has been available in Germany and twelve other European countries as well as Japan and South Korea since October 18th. A launch in Singapore and Malaysia is planned for this year.

A rocky road for Bytedance

The company has not yet commented on a possible US start.

The United States is the largest potential market for VR devices, but it is fraught with pitfalls for Bytedance. On the one hand, the TikTok mother has been threatened for a long time regulatory measuresfor another, Meta Quest 2 is there especially strong. Bytedance executives are themselves according to a report aware that it would be “extremely difficult and enormously expensive” to challenge Meta in its home market.

Pico 4 is after PicoNeo 3 Link the second consumer-focused Pico headset to appear in the West. The launch comes two years after Meta Quest 2 went on sale, a period in which Meta’s VR headset was able to penetrate the market undisturbed.

According to a June report by market research firm IDC, Meta controls 90 percent of the VR marketfollowed by Pico with a share of 4.5 percent.

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