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BlackBerry Remains Committed To Smartphone Business, Despite $670M Net Loss In Last Three Months (baytoday.ca)
AchilleTalon writes: BlackBerry CEO John Chen refuses to give up on the company's hardware business despite lackluster sales of its first Android-powered smartphone, the Priv. The Canadian smartphone maker reported a $670 million net loss in the first quarter of its 2017 financial year, but said its recovery plan for the year remains on track. Chen, who has stated the company's No. 1 goal is to make its smartphone device business profitable this fiscal year, said he expects the company's new mobility solutions segment to break even or record a slight profit during the third quarter, which ends Nov. 30, 2016. During BlackBerry's first quarter -- second full quarter to include Priv sales -- the company sold roughly 500,000 devices at an average price of $290 each, he said, which is about 100,000 smartphones fewer than the previous quarter and about 200,000 fewer than two quarters earlier. Previously, the company said it needs to sell about three million phones at an average of $300 each to break even, though Chen indicated that may change as the software licensing business starts to contribute to revenue.
Blackberry is running as if telcos are its customers. They aren't and Apple ended that business model and they need to get used to it.
I want the android sandbox to lie to applications.
I want a check box next to all the junk an application wants and I want to be able to tell it yes, no, lie.
I want them to fix the bugs on my Q10. The thing likes to reboot after I set it down on its screen after phone calls.
I have no intention of buying one of their Android phones. If I wanted Android, I would buy something else and I haven't.
On the plus side, I had my Q10 for a week before I ever even signed up for an account of any kind. The phone works well and running all the data over a VPN to my server is showing no leaking of data even with a "no data" sim installed. I like that but I've run my own servers for decades.
Wait untill the French and English speaking parts of Canada become independent.
They compromised security of their devices for a few bucks when that security was one of the big selling points of their devices. The company is never going to recover from it.
It's worth mentioning that most of their loss came from a long lived asset impairment charge of 500 million, not inventory write down. Most articles are insinuating that handsets are the cause of their losses by lumping it in the same headline which is inaccurate. They did only sell around 500k devices this quarter which is low for any smartphone company. However, the CEO has gotten the cost of the handset business to be break even at 3 million phones. If you contrast that with the billions Blackberry was writing down on handsets alone a few years ago, you can see why it's not a horrible decision. Besides, it sounds like they want to start licensing out their software like the HUB and BBM to other manufacturers, and I don't know who would take them up on that unless they could prove their own users are installing/using it.
If consumers could actually buy a priv at $290, things might have turned out differently. I've never seen one for sale anywhere close to that price.
Let's just briefly review why BBRY's stock is at 6.75 a share and plummeting.
1. Lost sight of their market. Very similar to Microsoft in this regard, although lacking the nigh-trillion dollars of off-shore reserves to recover from dumb mistakes. Both companies make all their profit from enterprises, which are usually run by older folks more comfortable with the tried and true rather than the hot new fashions. But both BlackBerry and Microsoft wanted the juicy cut of Apple's revenues that come from teenagers and young adults using sexy devices. Unfortunately they both failed to create anything sexy, so their advertisements featuring people in fedoras and summer dresses dancing to pop music on a table in joy when a new MSFT/BBRY product comes out missed the mark quite a bit, failing to bring in new audiences and alienating their current customers.
2. Compromised security. They might have won a few government contracts by bragging about backdooring their devices in order to assist law enforcement, but they lost just about everybody else interested in security and privacy (for business or state reasons).
3. The Priv. My gosh, what a shitty device the Priv is. More expensive than the Galaxy S6 and the iPhone 6s on release, but with a cheap plastic slide-out keyboard that makes an uncomfortable grinding sound and abysmal camera. Pass.
4. Slow transition to Android. Developers want to push their stuff onto the Apple Store and Google Play Store because that's where the money is; BB10 is an afterthought *at best*. BlackBerry was really, really late to the party on this one; they got Android apps in 2014, but through a compatibility layer through the Amazon Appstore, so with a shitty selection and axed performance. And their first Android device was shite (see #3).
5. Internet shills. Nothing wrecks your credibility faster than paying people to astroturf for you.
It's a shame because BlackBerry had a lot of good things going for them. The physical keyboard and social communications hub are still unmatched. It's unfortunate that they had such crummy executive management.
It is truely wild how widespread this problem is. I discovered the business card fix on my own after running into a restarting phone. I ended up just putting the business card flat on the back of the battery, not on the far edge and it worked fine. Anyway, complete insanity that these phones made it through quality control.
No, he isn't - $89 million of _share value_ that isn't available to him for ~5 years does not count as salary. You can't just take shares given when a person is hired, multiply by current stock price and add it on to someone's salary. I think his annual cash compensation is around $300,000. If BB goes bankrupt, those shares aren't worth anything.