Blackberry has announced that the company ultimately loss $207 million in the second quarter of its fiscal year. The company reported revenue of $916 million for the quarter, $50 million less than revenue reported in the first quarter of the fiscal year. The company’s cash holdings remained unchanged from the previous quarter at $3.1 billion. The company also reported an operating loss of $11 million for the quarter, excluding a charge related to the lower value of BlackBerry’s bonds and charges for layoffs and other restructuring.
While many analysts are hesitant to say that Blackberry has turned around, they are willing to agree that the company is no longer on the brink of financial disaster. Executive chairman and chief executive John S. Chen has pledged to turn around the company and started with a series of severe cutbacks and layoffs in areas of the company that were stagnating. The company is once again hiring employees for divisions of the company that are expected to experience growth in the near future.
However, some analysts are unconvinced, believing that it will still take years for the company to turn around its business and increase its relevance in the mobile industry. Blackberry’s latest smartphone release has met with a tepid reception so far. The company is visibly shifting towards becoming a company that mainly provides software and services for mobile devices used by corporate and government entities, but since the beginning of the fiscal year, services and software fell from 61 percent to 54 percent of the company’s overall business.
Blackberry has been trying to increase consumer interest in their phones by revamping their designs and offering more features. BlackBerry phones used to run on the company’s closed, secure data network, generating service fees of about $19 a year per device for years after the initial sale of the handset. However, with the release of the BlackBerry 10 operating system, Blackberry phones can now work without connecting to BlackBerry’s data network.
