BlackBerry announces poor Q3 results

BlackBerry has just announced its third quarter fiscal 2014 results and, as expected, they aren’t pretty. The Waterloo-based business has been through a consistent “transformation” that recently saw the company completely shed their executive team, and usher in the era of John Chen — who’s known as “the fixer.”

Backed with two open letters, Chen previously noted that BlackBerry will focus its efforts on the enterprise market by “going back to our heritage and roots.” Three months ago, at the end of Q2, former CEO Thorsten Heins stated, “We remain a financially strong company,” but the company still lost $965 million, mainly due to a “BlackBerry Z10 Inventory Charge.”

Now, three months later, BlackBerry has yet again lost a massive amount of money. According to their filing, BlackBerry had Q3 revenues of $1.2 billion, down from $1.6 billion in Q2, with a massive net loss of $4.4 billion. As for smartphones sales, BlackBerry said, “approximately 4.3 million BlackBerry smartphones were sold through to end customers,” but only managed to “recognized hardware revenue on approximately 1.9 million BlackBerry smartphones.” One would think that hardware sales were mostly BlackBerry 10 devices (Z10, Q10, Z30 and Q5), but the report noted that “most of the units recognized were BlackBerry 7 devices.” The good news is that BlackBerry has $3.2 billion cash on hand.

John Chen, Executive Chairman and CEO of BlackBerry, stated “With the operational and organizational changes we have announced, BlackBerry has established a clear roadmap that will allow it to target a return to improved financial performance in the coming year… We have accomplished a lot in the past 45 days, but still have significant work ahead of us as we target improved financial performance next year. However, the Company is financially strong, has a broad and trusted product portfolio to work with, a talented employee base and a new leadership team dedicated to implementing our new roadmap.”

Source: MarketWired