Business Mobile

BB10 fails to turn a profit for BlackBerry in first full quarter of availability

As reported on The Verge.

By Aaron Souppouris

Blackberry 10 Experience event (STOCK)

After two quarters of meager profits, BlackBerry has posted its Q1 2014 results (for the three-month period ending June 1st 2013), revealing an $84 million loss from $3.1 billion revenue. Compared to last quarter, when the Canadian manufacturer made $94 million from $2.7 billion, the revenue results are fairly positive, although Wall Street hoped to see $3.3 billion.

 

Revenues

With smartphone shipments, BlackBerry’s position strengthened for the first time in a while. After five consecutive quarters of falling shipments, this quarter saw a rise from 6 million to 6.8 million worldwide. It’s not clear how many were BlackBerry 10 devices, but the fact that the company has neglected to give us exact figures this time doesn’t bode well. Last quarter, the company explained that around 17 percent of the smartphones it shipped were running BlackBerry 10.

Smartphones

The company also didn’t update investors on its subscriber base — a figure that represents the total number of BlackBerrys in use. It has consistently released this sort of information along with its financial results in the past, but he hope to find out more specifics on performance in an investor call later, and will update this article with any additional information.

BlackBerry has pinned its hopes on the success of its new operating system, and this is the first full quarter of sales since its all-touch Z10 smartphone was released. It’s worth noting that, although it has been on sale in Europe and elsewhere for some time, the much-anticipated Q10 QWERTY smartphone was launched in the US after this financial period ended. The company’s stock is currently down 20 percent in pre-market trading.