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Blackberry Businesses Android Canada Cellphones Software The Almighty Buck News Hardware Technology

BlackBerry Remains Committed To Smartphone Business, Despite $670M Net Loss In Last Three Months (baytoday.ca) 78

Posted by BeauHD from the time-to-throw-in-the-towel dept.
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.
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BlackBerry Remains Committed To Smartphone Business, Despite $670M Net Loss In Last Three Months More

BlackBerry Remains Committed To Smartphone Business, Despite $670M Net Loss In Last Three Months

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  • Do CEOs ever... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Recognize their business has failed and decide to give money back to investors.

    • Due to the rate their sales are declining, Chen needs a large salary raise to compensate...
    • They recognize that the business is failing, but why look for a new job (that no one would want to give you given your current poor record) when you can keep the company around for a few more years and bilk the shareholders for a bit longer until they decide to fire you at which point some golden parachute clause in your contract kicks in and you get even more money?

    • Yes, many of them do. You don't hear about it because most large companies have multiple divisions, some of which are still profitable. So instead of closing down the company entirely, they shutter the unprofitable parts and return the capital to investors in the form of increased dividends and/or share buybacks.

      A good example is IBM. IBM recognized 10-15 years ago that most of its commodity hardware was uncompetitive. Personal computers, x86 servers, semiconductor foundry, etc. were all money-losers fo

  • LOL (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I'm LOLing at the Europeans this morning, most of whom are mourning the first of many nations to leave the EU. It's a matter of time before the rest of the EU fails, too. I'm so thankful for being a Canadian, because we are smarter and better than the Europeans and Americans.

  • Recovery? With what clientele? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    They sold out their customers wholesale to any and all law enforcement that came calling, complete with master key. Why would anyone still want to carry one of their phones, regardless of OS?

  • They don't know who their customers are (Score:3)

    by thogard ( 43403 ) on Friday June 24, 2016 @06:00AM (#52380023) Homepage

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by johanw ( 1001493 )

      > 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.

      Use Android, root it, install Xposed and Xprivacy. Ready.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Octorian ( 14086 )

      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.

      This is an easily fixed mechanical issue. You just need to make a small shim out of piece of a business card, and wrap it around the far edge of the battery, to increase pressure on the electrical contacts on the other side.

      • 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.

  • Make a decent phone, decent price, slide out physical keyboard, long battery life and goddam headphone jack and there you go, Try to imitate the iphone and they will fail.

    • Apart from the price, you're describing the Priv exactly.

      • And the passport.

        And I've got both a Z10 and Z30, and love them as much as my BB 5790, 6210, 6750, 7230, 8820, 9700 Bold, and 9900.

        • 1. BBOS is EOL, so that would be a no go on the 'decent phone' front (with security and regular updates being pretty much inexistent).
          2. The Passport does not have a slide out physical keyboard.

      • Apart from the price, you're describing the Priv exactly.

        Sounds like I should've got one of those instead of this stupid shitty windows phone I got. Hopefully they're still around when my contract is up.

      • Make a decent phone, decent price, slide out physical keyboard, long battery life and goddam headphone jack and there you go, Try to imitate the iphone and they will fail.

        Apart from the price *and the battery life*, you're describing the Priv exactly.

        There, FTFY.

        I busted my phone a couple of months back (low-slung car and closing doors, don't ask), so I figured I'd take a venture on the Priv, since I like pretty much everything about BB except the paucity of apps when compared to the Android ecosystem.

        I had it for approximately 24 hours, then brought it back (and thanked goodness my provider had a 'love it' guarantee on new phones!). The battery life was...less than optimal. I unplugged it in the morning the day after I received it (approximately 7:30

        • I had it for approximately 24 hours

          You're an idiot if you think that is enough to properly gauge battery life. The battery sensors are not even calibrated at that point.

          There are hundreds of screenshots by people easily lasting 3 days with their privs (and that is my personal experience as well). Screen on-time is less and varies, obviously, but it is perfectly reasonable compared to the competition.

          • I had it for approximately 24 hours

            You're an idiot if you think that is enough to properly gauge battery life. The battery sensors are not even calibrated at that point.

            There are hundreds of screenshots by people easily lasting 3 days with their privs (and that is my personal experience as well).

            I did go through a full charge/discharge cycle the previous evening, which is when the apparently rapid battery use first caught my eye (as in, when it died in my pocket while at a restaurant). That's why I was watching the battery closely the second day, to see how it performed during moderate use on wi-fi, not (maybe) searching for cell signals or something.

            Funny how my Samsung (and my Sony before that) had absolutely no problem lasting 2-4 days right out of the box (2 days with moderate usage and setup,

    • Make a decent phone, decent price, slide out physical keyboard, long battery life and goddam headphone jack and there you go, Try to imitate the iphone and they will fail.

      Um, didn't they already do that? (Try to imitate the iPhone and failed?)

  • Shot themselves in the foot (Score:3)

    by Sibko ( 1036168 ) on Friday June 24, 2016 @06:18AM (#52380113)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by thogard ( 43403 )

      Put a network snooper on your phone when connected to wifi and tell me someone hasn't sold out. I prefer they sell out to governments (who can tap my stuff anyway) over some random game developer.

  • Long lived asset impairment charges (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Subratik ( 1747672 ) on Friday June 24, 2016 @06:27AM (#52380145)

    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.

  • Price (Score:3)

    by itamblyn ( 867415 ) on Friday June 24, 2016 @07:23AM (#52380465) Homepage
    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.

  • BlackBerry's errors (Score:4, Informative)

    by LichtSpektren ( 4201985 ) on Friday June 24, 2016 @09:16AM (#52381255)
    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.

    • 6. Unrootable Priv.

      I would have purchased it on release day had it simply been rootable. Instead, they bent over backwards to make sure it can NEVER be rootable. Sorry, that's a hard fail for me. If you can't root the phone, you can never properly secure the phone. Relying on a third party for your security is a recipe for disaster.

  • How the hell do these things retail for $900 (CAD) when they sell wholesale for $290? No wonder there's a cell phone shop around every corner... I knew Apple's hardware cost was in the ~$200 range, but I never imagined they were selling to retailers for anything like that price.

  • In related news... market remains committed to not buying BlackBerry products.

    • Re: In related news... (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      BB used to sell 75 times more smartphones per quarter six years ago and have been declining ever since with not a single sign of anything getting better. They should have sold the business years ago, now they are just destroying every last bit of share holder value. Fail.

  • Blackberry was known, and popular, for their hardware keyboards....

    There are numerous dedicated fans of Android sliders.

    There are NO Android sliders left on the US market, and the last few like the Droid 4, Photon Q, LG Mach/Optimus F3Q (which sell used for abnormally high prices) are all getting decrepit and with out-dated OS versions.

    It seems like a no brainer for Blackberry to bring back the Android slider.

    Instead they make the Priv, which has a tiny keyboard that slides out in portrait mode (not landsca

  • This is a fabulous device. Seriously. What's tragic is that Rim seems unable to market a fire hose to a man in a burning building.
    For years and years, I see people posting here lamenting about missing a good physical keyboard wanting a good touch screen, and to mitigate crap security on Android. After a series of halfway decent Android phones, I bought the passport and was extremely pleasantly surprised. Android support, a great keyboard, surprising innovation with touch support across the keyboard surface

    • Just curious, what do you think of your battery life?

      I tried the Priv when I broke my previous (Android) phone, and while I liked the form factor, operation speed and features, the extremely crappy battery life out of the box killed the deal for me. Maybe there are a host of secret config settings or battery-saving apps I could have installed to make it usable, or maybe I had a faulty battery or some such, but I'm afraid I wasn't patient enough (or didn't quite love it enough) to find out.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by xeno ( 2667 )

        Battery life is good. ---- By that I mean I'm an extremely heavy user, and a charge lasts me all day on most but not all days. I run probably 2hrs of voice calls and 4hrs of video calls a day on average, w/Google hangouts, Starleaf, Zoom, and Webex. There's a constant flow of email, handful of document downloads every day for review (tho I edit on laptop/not a complete masochist), and Hipchat is constantly running in the background which is a total battery hog. On top of that there are a few personal it

        • Out of the box, battery life was terrible, but it improved markedly after the first 3-5 days. I don't know if that's because it finished a bunch of background updates, or if the battery optimization algorithm needed time to figure things out, but instead of starting at 6am and dying at 3pm, it started to last until 9-10pm. if I'd based my judgement on the first day or two's battery life, I would have returned the phone. Glad I didn't.

          Hmm...that is interesting. In my experience, I've only ever had battery life go down over time, never increase.

          Unfortunately, I only had about 36 hours to check it out before I couldn't swap it out with my provider (technically I was supposed to have a week, but I was out of town when it arrived and I was told that that's when the countdown started...as I picked it up 5 and a half days later). I had to evaluate based on observed performance in the 24-36 hours I had available, and since every other phone I

  • With the release of smartphones I didn't even think Blackberry was still in the game! If they design a new line a phone MAYBE they could make a dent in the market, but I highly doubt it.

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