Canadian smartphone maker BlackBerry has reported its first quarter fiscal results for 2014 (ending 1 June) revealing that total revenue and smartphone sales were growing in comparison to its previous quarter.
In total, revenue was up to $3.1bn representing a 15 percent increase from its last Q4 2013 period and sales of its smartphones increased 13 percent, to a total of 6.8 million devices during the three months. It also shipped around 100,000 of its PlayBook tablets.
“During the first quarter, we continued to focus our efforts on the global roll out of the BlackBerry 10 platform,” Thorsten Heins, President and CEO of BlackBerry, said. “We are still in the early stages of this launch, but already, the BlackBerry 10 platform and BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 are proving themselves to customers to be very secure, flexible and dynamic mobile computing solutions.”
However, despite the growth in revenues and shipments, the hardware maker said it made an overall loss of $84m, in part due to highly competitive market conditions. Nevertheless, it’s considerably better than the loss it made during the same period last year, which equated to around $510m as it waited for the introduction of its new platform.
In North America revenues increased around 30 percent, while in the Asia-Pacific region they were up 35 percent. Performance in EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) wasn’t quite as strong, but the company still posted a nine percent increase in revenues.
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BlackBerry launched its new (BlackBerry 10) platform in January of this year, but surprised industry watchers by not bringing its well-loved trademark Qwerty keyboard to its first device to go on sale. Instead, it released a full touchscreen smartphone, the Z10, which has since been joined by the Qwerty-equipped Q10 and will soon be joined by another mid-range device, the Q5.
Looking to the future, Heins said BlackBerry would be “increasing our investments to support the roll out of new products and services, and to demonstrate that BlackBerry has established itself as a leading and vibrant player in next generation mobile computing solutions for both consumer and enterprise customers”.
Despite Heins’s confidence BlackBerry has been struggling to gain traction in the consumer market for some time now, nevertheless, it continues to try and make inroads in a bid to take a bite out of rivals’ market share. Despite this, the company still has a number of large enterprise customers that tend to favor BlackBerry for its reputation as being one of the most secure mobile platforms when used in conjunction with its BlackBerry Enterprise Service (BES) offering.
Image Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images
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