Palm Shifted Just 408,000 Smartphones Last Quarter, Insists Future Is Bright

Palm Inc. today reported lacklustre sales figures demonstrating its inability to sell its Pre and Pixi smartphones to consumers and increase its share in a market dominated by iPhone, Blackberry and Android devices.

The company shipped 960,000 smartphones to stores and distributors in the company’s third quarter, a larger amount of handsets than Palm investors expected. That said, the company only managed to sell just 408,000 WebOS enabled smartphones.

The figures posted by Palm are a stark contrast to those posted by its rivals; Apple managed to sell 8.7 million units in its most recent quarter and Google is expected to ship an estimated 5 million handsets according to BusinessInsider.

Whilst sales figures were considerably down, Palm do have cause to remain optimistic. Palm managed to reduce its net losses from $95 million to $18.5 million and increase revenue, topping $350 million, up from $90.6 million the previous year.

In a statement, Palm CEO, Jon Rubinstein said:

Our recent underperformance has been very disappointing, but the potential for Palm remains strong. The work we’re doing to improve sales is having an impact, we’re making great progress on future products, and we’re looking forward to upcoming launches with new carrier partners. Most importantly, we have built a unique and highly differentiated platform in webOS, which will provide us with a considerable – and growing – advantage as we move forward.

In a bid to reverse the companies fortunes, Rubinstein mentioned that Palm is increasing the level of retail training to further educate in-store employees in order to increase the number of Palm products sold. Recently, Palm has galvanized its marketing strategy, pushing the launch of its new ad campaign that ZDNet suggest will debut during March Madness basketball games.

After posting poor figures, analysts are still suggesting that Palm could be ripe for an acquisition on the basis that Palm’s WebOS mobile operating system has received praise from critics and that it has secured the patents of key technologies.

Palm will hope that it can survive a very turbulent first year, using existing capital to survive its early setbacks and eventually become profitable.