Canadian smartphone maker BlackBerry on Friday reported ‘better than expected’ loss result for the second quarter ending August 31 just days after launching a new enterprise dedicated smartphone dubbed ‘Passport’.
The Waterloo (Ontario)-headquartered company posted a net loss of $207 million (£126 million), or 39 cents per share crushing Wall Street forecast of a loss of 16 cents a share. The loss of $207m marked an improvement as compared to a year-earlier loss of $965 million (£591 million), or $1.84 per share.
The revenue figure, however, fell nearly 42 per cent to $916 million (£561 million) from $965 million (£591 million) in the previous quarter and $1.6 billion in the same period last year. The revenue earned during the quarter failed to meet investor expectations of $950 million.
The revenue breakdown for the quarter was split between 46 per cent hardware, 46 per cent services and 8 per cent software. The company announced it sold nearly 2.1 million Blackberry smartphones during the quarter, down from the 2.6 million sales reported in June and 3.7 million smartphones sold in the same period last year.
BlackBerry noted that it has issued a total of 3.1 million BES 10 licences and that its instant chatting app BBM currently has a monthly active user base of 91 million as compared to 85 million reported in the prior quarter.
Announcing the second quarter earning Blackberry CEO John Chen said “We delivered a solid quarter against our key operational metrics, and we are confident that we will achieve breakeven cash flow by the end of [fiscal year 2015].”
“Our workforce restructuring is now complete, and we are focusing on revenue growth with judicious investments to further our leadership position in enterprise mobility and security, driving us towards non-GAAP profitability during [fiscal year 2016].”
Amid loss quarter results, Chen took pride in announcing that the company has managed to sell as many as 200,000 Passport smartphones since its Wednesday debut.
Chen noted that the passport shaped handset sold out in 6 hours after its announcement on the company’s official website and in 10 hours on Amazon, making up for the bulk of its 200,000 preorders.
BlackBerry shares rose more than 4 per cent on Friday after the earnings were released.
