BlackBerry has been lagging behind in the smartphone game for the past year and now, the company has reported significant losses in its third quarter sales.
According to USA Today, the company reported $1.2 billion in revenue in this quarter, down from $2.7 billion the year before. BlackBerry reported a loss of $4.4 billion, while its adjusted losses from continuing operations hit $354 million or 67 cents per share. Analysts polled by FactSet, on average, expect a loss of 43 cents per share on revenue of $1.66 billion.
According to reports, shares of the company fell nearly 7 percent in pre-market trading before coming back. Shares are now up 3.3 percent. This is bad news for new CEO John Chen, who took over last month for Thorsten Heins. This is the first quarterly report since Chen took the helm of the company.
"We have accomplished a lot in the past 45 days, but still have significant work ahead of us as we target improved financial performance next year," Chen said in a statement.
The low earnings prove that the company's plan to rebound off of its BlackBerry 10 smartphones won't work as consumers have failed to show interest in a 10 family of smartphones in a market dominated by Apple and Google. To add insult to injury, Microsoft's Windows Phones platform reportedly jumped to third place taking BlackBerry out of the top three.
For the quarter, BackBerry sold 4.3 million smartphones, but the majority were older devices running the BlackBerry 7 os.
With the disappointing earnings, BlackBerry seems to be putting its hopes in a new plan to focus their time on creating a smartphone for Indonesia and "other fast-growing markets." It will do this with the help of its new partner, the Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn.
Although it will continue to work on hardware, the company will shift more of its focus to enterprise services and messaging, including its BlackBerry Messenger service.
