To put it quite simply, Blackberry’s hardware business hinges on how the Blackberry Priv smartphone does in sales. Blackberry CEO John Chen has said as much, and it might be met with a collective sigh of relief from everybody in the Canada-based company that Blackberry’s first Android smartphone did well last quarter.
According to BlackBerry, the company earned USD$548 million in global revenue in the quarter ended November 28 – almost 12 percent more revenue than the previous quarter, and the first time since 2013 that the company posted two straight quarterly increases in revenue. Unfortunately for us, Chen has been a bit cagey with information if the increase in revenue is due to the Blackberry Priv’s sales performance.
So we have to put some pieces together from the information they did release. First, that it had sold 700,000 phones during that period. Secondly, the average price of the smartphones sold in its last quarter was USD$315, a big year-over-year improvement from the November 2014 quarter’s figure of USD$240. Judging from this, we might surmise that the Blackberry Priv sold enough units (part of the 700,000 phones the company sold) to bump up the average price. The Priv sells for a hefty USD$700, the company’s most premium phone at the moment.
Lastly, we hear Chen’s statement: “My first goal is to get us into a break-even position with the device business, because you really couldn’t do anything strategically with a business that continues to lose money,” he said. “We’re in that ballpark now.” Make of that what you will.
VIA: Modern Readers
