BlackBerry has recently reported its quarterly results and they are everything but impressive. The company sold some 3.7 million smartphones in the second quarter for a total revenue of approximately $1.6 billion. Unfortunately though, most of these were BlackBerry 7 (rather than BlackBerry 10) devices.
The GAAP loss from continuing operations is valued $965 million, or $1.84 per share diluted, while adjusted loss is $248 million, or $0.47 per share diluted.
Meanwhile, BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 is going well with more than 25,000 commercial and test servers installed to date, up from 19,000 in July 2013.
This is also the first time BlackBerry’s CEO Thorsten Heins said he’s “very disappointed” with the results.
So what can BlackBerry do? Accept the buy-out offer from Fairfax Financial? That’s arguably their best bet at the moment. The alternative is to split the company into pieces and make money from selling patents and software. We don’t like that idea cause we want another contender in the mobile space, and yes I personally think BlackBerry is onto something. The problem is that it doesn’t have resources (read: money) to compete with the big boys. Perhaps they should outsource some of the development to places like India to save some cash along the way. Or enter into a partnership with some cash-rich Chinese vendor which is desperately trying to enter the enterprise market. That other idea actually sounds plausible — and I may explore it in a separate article — though we’re not sure where the company will be heading from here…