BlackBerry announced its Q1 Fiscal 2017 results today revealing that the company’s ongoing revenue decline is continuing.
The Waterloo-based company declared a net loss of $670 million, which is a significant turn in the wrong direction as a year ago it revealed a profit of 68 million, according to the filing.
Revenues for the quarter were $424 million, which is a decrease from a year ago at $658 million. BlackBerry said the loss was caused by a “long lived asset impairment charge of $501 million, a $57 million goodwill impairment charge, inventory write-down of $41 million.”
BlackBerry currently has a total of $2.5 billion available in cash and investments in the bank.
During the investor conference call, BlackBerry revealed it sold approximately 500,000 smartphones in the last quarter, with the specific division losing revenues of $21 million. In addition, the company is expecting to see its handset jump to profitability in Q3 of this fiscal year, perhaps with the release of new Android devices.
One of the ways that BlackBerry aims to make the handset business profitable, apart from physical handset sales, is by licensing its software, such as BlackBerry Hub as well as its power management capabilities.
BlackBerry, however, highlighted launch of BlackBerry Radar, its new end-to-end asset tracking system. The company also highlighted the fact that it now has a total of over 3,300 enterprise customers and that 74 percent of Q1 software revenue is reoccurring.
“BlackBerry is differentiated by cross-platform market leadership in software, an end-to-end secure mobility platform and a strong financial foundation. Our Q1 results highlight these attributes. Excluding IP licensing, we have more than doubled our software revenue on a year-over-year basis for the second consecutive quarter, driven by our EMM, secure messaging and QNX embedded software businesses. In our Mobility Solutions business, our objective is to achieve operating profitability in the short term,” said Blackberry CEO John Chen in a statement.
“We also expect to generate positive free cash flow for the full year.”
Related: Making handsets profitable is BlackBerry’s main objective for this year
[source] BlackBerry [/source]
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