One day after analysts predicted BlackBerry would report its worst quarterly sales in nine years, BlackBerry surprised Wall Street — and Main Street — by recording a profit for the company’s fourth financial quarter, reports Reuters.
BlackBerry reported a net profit of $28 million, a huge boost from the $148 million net loss the company reported during the same period in the year before. Taking away one-time items, BlackBerry recorded a quarterly profit of $20 million.
The good news continued for BlackBerry, as the company also reported a 20-percent increase in its software revenue, going up to $67 million. BlackBerry had a quarterly positive cash flow of $76 million, with its cash position now standing at $3.27 billion, an increase from $3.1 billion in the third quarter.
Unfortunately for BlackBerry, revenue was the biggest sore spot, sliding down to $660 million. This is a decrease from $793 million the year before, and it falls well short of analyst estimates of $786.4 million for the quarter. Hardware was also another sore spot, declining 22 percent year-over-year and 23 percent from the previous quarter.
To put things in perspective, BlackBerry sold 1.6 million handsets, which isn’t half bad, all things considered. However, it’s certainly not enough to appease investors, or signal a comeback for BlackBerry.
As a result, BlackBerry CEO John Chen said his company will now focus on ending its revenue slide. “Our financial viability is no longer in question,” said Chen during the conference call. “We’re now turning our attention to revenue stabilization.”
How Chen will achieve a happy balance is another question altogether, and one that he didn’t address at the time. Still, BlackBerry has an ambitious device roadmap planned for 2015, including a new touchscreen-only phone called the Leap, a tablet, and a mysterious Slider phone, which Chen teased at Mobile World Congress in March.
