The IT Nerd

I think it’s safe to say now that John Chen isn’t exactly turning around BlackBerry. I say that because Q1 earnings are out and they are not good. You can read all the news here [Warning: PDF], but here’s the highlights… or low lights.

• BlackBerry served up a net loss of $670 million. This time last year, they made $68 million. That’s not good.
• Revenue for the quarter were $424 million, down from $658 million a year ago.
• BlackBerry has $2.5 billion in the bank.

Here’s were things get interesting. BlackBerry on a conference call that I tuned into is doubling down on making smartphones. This despite that section of their business apparently losing $21 million. They seem to think that new handsets coming in Q3 will help them turn that around and they pointed out that they sold 500,000 smartphones in Q1. For me that all falls into “good luck with that” country as they really have no marketshare (less that 1% at present) and mindshare at the moment.

Now John Chen says that the above combined with the fact that it now has a total of over 3,300 enterprise customers and that 74 percent of Q1 software revenue is reoccurring, and the fact that they have other stuff that people want (like QNX or BlackBerry Radar), that this will drive them to profitability for the full year. I remain skeptical, but I suppose anything is possible.

This entry was posted on June 24, 2016 at 8:53 am and is filed under Commentary with tags BlackBerry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.