BlackBerry finally confirmed the $965 million loss, posting its second quarter report today. According to the company, last year, it had lost $235 million or 45 cents a share, while this year it was almost four times of that amount. Further, the company’s revenues fell by 45 per cent to $1.57 billion as compared to the $2.86 billion that it had made a year ago. This is no surprise though as the ailing Canadian company had announced such results last week only.
Last week BlackBerry had released preliminary figures and had also announced that it would downsize on about 45 per cent of it staff. Further, the company also said it will leave the consumer market and focus on enterprise or business customers. This past Monday (23 September), BlackBerry announced a $4.7 billion deal for a buyout by Fairfax Financial. This would also take the company into private territory.
The reason for BlackBerry’s humongous loss was the failure of the BlackBerry Z10 smartphones. The company had to write off a loss of $934 million because of unsold inventory of these smartphones. The smartphones was the first one to run on the next generation BlackBerry 10 operating system.
While the company did sell 3.7 million devices, most of them were the ones running on older versions of the BlackBerry operating system.
