BlackBerry 10 was supposed to be the Canadian company’s big entrance into the touch smartphone market. The BlackBerry Z10 and BlackBerry Q10 smartphones were, essentially, a late play for the company to compete with Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 for third place in the growing smartphone market. This week, BlackBerry released its Q1 results and it’s clear that BlackBerry 10 hasn’t produced the huge turnaround the company was hoping for.
BlackBerry reported an $84 million operating loss during its first quarter – the same quarter that saw the release of the Z10 and Q10. This loss came on revenues of $3.1 billion – an improvement from the previous quarter, but still short of analyst estimates. The company shipped 6.8 million smartphones during Q1 – a 13% rise from the previous quarter, but still a disappointment for investors. BlackBerry stock is currently trading down over 25%
“During the first quarter, we continued to focus our efforts on the global roll out of the BlackBerry 10 platform,” said Thorsten Heins, President and CEO of BlackBerry. “We are still in the early stages of this launch, but already, the BlackBerry 10 platform and BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 are proving themselves to customers to be very secure, flexible and dynamic mobile computing solutions. Over the next three quarters, we will be increasing our investments to support the roll out of new products and services, and to demonstrate that BlackBerry has established itself as a leading and vibrant player in next generation mobile computing solutions for both consumer and enterprise customers.”
During today’s earnings call, Heins also stated that subscriber numbers are falling. Blackberry’s subscriber number has now fallen to 72 million, down 4 million from the previous quarter.