Waterloo-based BlackBerry has announced their fiscal Q1 2014 earning and smartphone shipments for the last 3-months totalled 6.8 million smartphones, up 13% from last quarter – mainly due to the new BlackBerry Z10, Q10 and Q5. The BlackBerry PlayBook, a tablet that has slowly been fading from existence, has managed to continue selling and saw shipments reach approximately 100,000.
BlackBerry reported revenues increase by 15% to $3.1 billion from $2.7 billion, but also revealed an operating loss of $84 million. According to the press release the revenue breakdown “was approximately 71% for hardware, 26% for service and 3% for software and other revenue.” While there was no mention of BB10 smartphone shipments, BlackBerry declared shipments of 1 million BlackBerry Z10s back in March.
After several months of seeing companies leave the brand for being behind the times, both with their OS and devices, many organizations have returned or praised BlackBerry, namely Canadian Tire, BMO Financial Group, Torys and Canadian Diabetes Association. Yesterday it was announced that 60% of the Fortune 500 companies “have ordered, downloaded or installed BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10, and 18,000 BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 servers have already been installed by customers around the world.”
Thorsten Heins, President and CEO of BlackBerry, said “During the first quarter, we continued to focus our efforts on the global roll out of the BlackBerry 10 platform. We are still in the early stages of this launch, but already, the BlackBerry 10 platform and BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 are proving themselves to customers to be very secure, flexible and dynamic mobile computing solutions. Over the next three quarters, we will be increasing our investments to support the roll out of new products and services, and to demonstrate that BlackBerry has established itself as a leading and vibrant player in next generation mobile computing solutions for both consumer and enterprise customers.”
The next device that BlackBerry is rumoured to launch is the A10 – codename of Aritso. This is expected to come with a 4.65-inch Super AMOLED display (1080×1920 resolution), 1.9GHz quad-core Qualcomm processor, 3000mAh battery, and 2GB RAM.
Update: During the earnings call BlackBerry specifically noted that approximately 40% of their 6.8 million smartphones shipped in the quarter were BB10 devices, making the number come in around 2.7 million Z10 and Q10s.
Source: BlackBerry
