Source: https://intelligence.businessinsider.com/welcome
BlackBerry shipments sunk to a new historical quarterly low of 1.3 million units in the first quarter of this year, according to its earnings report for the fiscal fourth quarter, which ends March 1.
- That's down almost 80% compared to the 6.2 million units BlackBerry shipped in the same period a year ago. Compared to the fourth quarter of 2013, when shipments hit a previous record low of 1.9 million units, shipments in the first quarter declined 32% sequentially.
- About 3.4 million BlackBerry devices were sold to end users during first quarter of 2013. And almost 68% of those devices ran on the superseded BlackBerry 7 OS instead of the newer BlackBerry 10 operating system.
- In fact, sales of new BlackBerry 10 devices have been so bad that BlackBerry is going to re-release the 2011 version of the BlackBerry Bold in order to spur consumer interest.
- BlackBerry's total revenue for the quarter sunk below $1 billion, coming in at $976 million, a 64% year-over-year decline.
It's becoming increasingly apparent that BlackBerry's hardware manufacturing business is only going to continue sinking.
While for the full year, a majority of BlackBerry's revenue still came from hardware, at 55%, the plunge in shipments over the course of the fiscal year meant that in the past quarter, hardware fell to just 37% of revenue. Just three quarters prior, hardware made up 71% of total revenue at the company.
Last quarter, BlackBerry agreed to offload some of its manufacturing operations to Foxconn. Now, alleviated of some expensive manufacturing costs, BlackBerry is also attempting to diversify and improve its software and services revenue stream.
Beyond its well-known enterprise mobility management services, BlackBerry's BBM messenger is proving a crucial avenue toward growth. The cross-platform messaging service has 85 million monthly active users, up from around 60 million back in October prior to the release of iOS and Android apps. Like other messaging services, BlackBerry can leverage BBM as a platform to sell other services like payments.
"... A lot of our growth, I believe will come -- at least in the immediate future ... from software and services, messaging like BBM and embedded software like QNX. We're building new features and value-added services into BES 12, and we have a very solid BBM monetization plan," said CEO John Chen in the company's ear! nings ca ll.
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