BlackBerry’s struggles continue.
Today the company announced its financial results for the last three months ending August 29. With revenues continuing to decline — they dropped by 46 percent to $490-million — BlackBerry posted a $66-million loss.
Compared to the previous quarter where it sold approximately 1.1 million devices, BlackBerry only sold about 800,000 devices at an average selling price of $240 in Q2 2016. In fact, with each subsequent quarter, BlackBerry has sold fewer and fewer devices. In Q4 2015, the company sold 1.3-million smartphones; the quarter prior to that one BlackBerry sold 2-million devices.
“I’m not satisfied [with] … where we are in the overall revenue and profitability, especially the performance of our handset business,” said CEO John Chen to the analysts that hopped onto the company’s earnings call.
There’s no tiptoeing around the issue, BlackBerry finds itself in a precarious position.
According to an unnamed source within the company interviewed by The Globe and Mail, some employees in BlackBerry’s hardware division have been told they’ll lose their job in November. Moreover, while we had reported on the most recent staff reductions undertaken by BlackBerry, according to the same Globe source, the company has quietly cut hundreds of more jobs that it has yet to disclose.
Still, with the impending release of the Priv, there may be a reason to be cautiously optimistic about the BlackBerry’s future prospects. Certainly, John Chen seemed hopeful for the future when he penned an op-ed on the CNBC website, stating that BlackBerry was about to embark upon a new chapter.
Just don’t expect the company to abandon its proprietary operating system, even as analysts like Daniel Chan urge the company to do so. Chen said during the company’s earnings call that it will stick with the operating system for at least the near future.
“There is a very loyal base in BB10, especially the government, and some highly regulated industry customers, so we will have to see whether we can make money on that base,” he said.
“If our plan of doing the BlackBerry-Android type of implementation works well, and the security side of the equation is well accepted by the government and this space, of course we could then replace or merge them.”
[source]MarketWired[/source][via]The Globe and Mail[/via]
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