The introduction of the...
The introduction of the BlackBerry 10 “has been worth the wait,” CEO Thorsten Heins said Thursday during a conference call with investors. The company said it shipped more than 1 million of its BlackBerry Z10 smartphones outside the U.S. during…
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Q4, which ended March 2. “That shows a huge trust,” Heins said. “It’s not in one single market. It really goes into the global market.” The Z10 shipment figure doesn’t include shipments in the U.S.; sales of the device in the U.S. began last week, BlackBerry said. U.S. sales of the Z10 have met early expectations, Heins said. The BlackBerry 10 rollout has been phased and will continue to ramp up over the next several quarters, with lower-cost BlackBerry 10 devices expected to go on sale later this year, Heins said. The Q10, which will include a QWERTY keyboard, is set to go on sale next month, but will not appear in the U.S. until May or June, he said. About 55 percent of BlackBerry Z10 sales have come from consumers who are migrating from competing devices. Overall BlackBerry device sales dropped from 6.9 million in Q3 to 6 million in Q4, the company said. BlackBerry ended Q4 with a net profit of $98 million, up from a $125 million net loss for the same period last year. The company’s total revenue for the quarter was nearly $2.7 billion. BlackBerry said it expects to “approach break-even” in its results for Q1, which will end June 1. The company continued to lose subscribers during Q4 -- it ended the quarter with 76 million subscribers, down from 79 million at the end of Q3. Most of the subscriber losses occurred in Europe and North America, though the company gained customers in Asia and Latin America. BlackBerry also announced that Mike Lazaridis, who co-founded BlackBerry under its former name -- Research In Motion (RIM) -- will retire as the company’s vice chairman and director on May 1. Lazaridis had previously been RIM’s co-CEO with Jim Basillie before Heins took over in January 2012 (http://bit.ly/10kq2fu).