The Canadian phone maker BlackBerry Ltd has just released its financials for its fiscal fourth quarter, and the results show that the company only managed to sell 600,000 units of its smartphones over the three-month period, almost 30% drop in revenue underscores its struggles to revive its handset business.
The 600,000 unit sales fall short of Wall Street's expectations, which predicted that BlackBerry would hit 850,000 units for the quarter. Furthermore, the latest results also mark a decrease from the 700,000 units BlackBerry sold in the previous quarter.
Chief Executive Officer John Chen built a turnaround plan on acquiring security software companies and selling their products to businesses and governments. Though Chen insisted the hardware side of the business would reach profitability by September with the help of a new handset and selling smartphone applications, he admitted the Android-based Priv. phone wasn't selling as well as he'd hoped.
Chen still believes BlackBerry is in no immediate danger and the phone business can return to profitability later in the year. Whether he's right is very much an open question - BlackBerry's total revenue for the 2016 fiscal year fell to $2.1 billion, down from $3.3 billion in FY 2015.
Seeking Alpha notes that "A healthy balance sheet means BlackBerry still has a sizable runway to pursue its turnaround efforts," and that's true - but it's also worth noting that to date, BlackBerry's turnaround efforts simply haven't yielded the fruit the company needs if it wants to remain in the business of designing and selling smartphones.
"People do like our Priv., but there's a much more limited audience and that segment seems to be saturated at the moment," Chen said on a conference call. "The number-one goal that the company has is to continue to ramp the software and services."
"I truly believe that we are very close in being able to break even or start to make money in device[s]," he added.
© 2017 Jobs & Hire All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
