It’s Black Friday for BlackBerry on Wall Street today after the embattled smartphone maker’s latest quarterly earnings report disappointed investors and analysts.
The report was so unsettling that Parmy Olson of Forbes says BlackBerry’s attempted turnaround “is starting to look like a bad horror movie.”
This morning, BlackBerry reported an unexpected loss of $85 million for the quarter ending June 1. As a natural consequent, shares quickly slid 25% to $10.80.
The sell-off was so strong that it completely erased all gains the company’s stock had made this year following the BlackBerry 10 launch.
The company shipped 6.8 million smartphones in the quarter, of which 2.7 million were powered by its new BlackBerry 10 software platform. Analysts had been expecting total shipments of 75 million and 3.6 million BB10 units….
“After a surprisingly strong fiscal Q4, BlackBerry is struggling with both limited traction for new devices (BB10) and sustained pressure on legacy devices (BB7),” observed Nomura analyst Stuart Jeffrey following the publication of today’s earnings report.
Nonetheless, executives for BlackBerry attempted to sound undeterred by the dismal report.
“During the first quarter, we continued to focus our efforts on the global roll out of the BlackBerry 10 platform,” CEO Thorsten Heins 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.”
