Why Meta's AR/VR Dreams Need China's Goertek
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Foxconn
14 min read
Foxconn is the archetypal example of a Taiwanese electronics manufacturer that became indispensable to Western tech giants, particularly Apple. Its history of vertical integration, scale, and the challenges companies face in diversifying away from it directly parallels Meta's current situation with Goertek, offering instructive context on electronics manufacturing dependency.
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MEMS
12 min read
The article mentions Goertek is 'the world's top supplier of MEMS acoustic sensors'—a critical component in AR/VR devices for spatial audio and voice input. Understanding MEMS technology explains why these microscale components require specialized manufacturing expertise that cannot be easily replicated elsewhere.
On Tuesday, Meta announced that they would pause the international rollout of their Ray Ban Display AR glasses to focus on fulfilling US orders due to extremely limited inventory. But the component shortages Meta is facing are especially acute, in part because of the company’s ongoing quest to reduce reliance on one particular Chinese supplier.
In September, FT reported that Meta was struggling to decouple from Goertek, the Shandong-based electronics giant that assembles Meta’s Quest headsets and Ray-Ban smart glasses. In that article, Hannah Murphy and Eleanor Olcott wrote that Goertek supplies “some components” for Meta, quoting a Meta representative who told FT, “We have a robust, diversified supply chain so we’re not solely dependent on any one manufacturer, and we’re constantly reviewing and exploring supply chain opportunities around the world.”
But what scale of dependence are we talking about exactly? By some estimates, Goertek only provides 6-7% of the total component value of the Meta Quest 3, so what exactly makes Goertek so difficult to replace?
Today, we’ll explore the partnership between Meta and Goertek, and examine whether decoupling extended reality (XR) supply chains is a serious possibility at all.
Disclaimer: Both Meta and Goertek are quite secretive about their partnership and the provenance of the components in Meta’s headsets, and there is very little official information available publicly. Instead, most information comes from teardowns, in which a third-party disassembles a headset purchased off the shelf to analyze its components. I have analyzed the publicly available information (including teardowns and official Goertek findings), but this analysis is my own. I take responsibility for any inaccuracies and welcome corrections from anyone with insider information!
What does Goertek do?
Goertek 歌尔股份 is the world’s largest XR Original Design Manufacturing (ODM) company, meaning they are the world’s largest manufacturer of AR and VR headsets. Jiang Bin 姜滨, Goertek’s co-founder and chairman, appeared at Xi’s business symposium in February alongside the founders of DeepSeek and Unitree. Here’s a refresher on the company’s history from my write-up of that symposium:
...Jiang Bin is the chairman of Goertek, a company he co-founded with his wife, Hu Shuangmei 胡双美, in 2001. Goertek is one of the primary manufacturers of Apple’s AirPods and Vision Pro headsets.
Jiang Bin was born in 1966 in Shandong province. He earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics and later an
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