The Takeaway: BlackBerry looks to software for recovery
The company reported quarterly earnings this morning, with revenues of $658 million -- off sharply from a year ago. (First-quarter revenues for the same period in 2014 were $966 million.)
BlackBerry also reported a 5-cents-per-share earnings loss, worse than the 3-cent-per-share loss Wall Street had expected. Even so, BlackBerry CEO John Chen was upbeat during a webcast Q-and-A about the quarter. "...We're definitely on solid financial footing," he said. "We're making good progress on distribution, on product portability and...on the software side, we're obviously quite pleased with the quarter."
Specifically, the company said:
Despite the continued reliance on smartphone sales, Chen said BlackBerry intends to pivot more to software with an eye on returning to profitability later this year: "We're not overly concerned (about hardware). More of our focus at the company right now is on expanding the distribution for software...."
Analysts were generally optimistic about the company's fortunes, but one -- Patrick Moorhead, an analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy -- urged the company to move fast. "BlackBerry needs to exit the hardware market and get on Android or Windows Phone immediately," he said. "Few developers want to write to their BlackBerry ecosystem and that's the kiss of death in the new world."
With reports from Matt Hamblen at Computerworld.