BlackBerry‘s woes are very well documented, and things aren‘t going to get better anytime soon. New interim CEO John Chen will know better than most and said that they only expect to return to profitability in 2016 and are doing their best to avoid further layoffs of the staff.
The company shipped only 1.9 million smartphones to retailers in Q3 compared to 3.7 million last quarter, and lost $4.4 billion. Most of the phones shipped were lower-priced BB7 models, and it lost a massive $2.6 billion on unsold BlackBerry 10 devices. Within the retails chains, a total of 4.3 million devices were sold so customers, of which only 1.1 million were BB10 devices.
Given that, Chen has already started making big changes, including a new organizational structure. The company will soon be divvied up into the following business units: Enterprise Services, Messaging, QNX Embedded and Devices. He hopes that’ll create more focus for the services group and greater efficiencies for its handset division.
BlackBerry has detailed a new five year partnership with Foxconn to curtail the sales freefall of recent years. According to BlackBerry, such a deal would let it focus on design and software, while “Foxconn’s scale and efficiency will let us compete more effectively.” Foxconn will be building the BlackBerry handsets in Indonesia and Mexico and the first devices will be shipped in March or April 2014. These devices will be BB10 only, which the company hopes will allow them to drop the older version completely.
The only bright spots in the quarter were messaging, with 40 million new Android and iOS users, and its bread and butter enterprise services. Given the hardware sales drop in just a single quarter, however, it seems to be do-or-die time for the iconic company.
Source: BlackBerry
