Shares of BlackBerry (bbry) plunged more than 26 per cent after the company delivered its first-quarter results Friday morning.
What analysts expected to be a major comeback for the Waterloo, Ont.-based company has instead been a “huge flop,” according to Hugh Miller, Bloomberg News technology correspondent.
The company was expecting a profit when it rolled out its Z10 in an attempt to get back into the consumer market with a touch-screen phone in January.
“Analysts were expecting $3.6 million to be sold, and they were almost a million short of that. The phones aren’t selling the way people expected them to,” Miller told CTV News Channel Friday.
The company posted a loss of US$84 million in the most recent quarter. This is an improvement from a loss of $518 million, or 99 cents per share, a year ago.
BlackBerry subscribers dropped by four million to 72 million in the quarter and in the future, the company does not plan to share those figures with the public.
What is essential to the company’s survival is getting the Q10 back in the hands of its faithful consumers, according to Miller and BNN’s Michael Hainsworth.
The Q10 that just hit U.S. stores features the iconic BlackBerry keyboard.
“The Q10 with QWERTY keyboard hasn’t been on sale long enough to see its success,” Hainsworth told CTV Toronto.
Hainsworth says consumers will have to wait three months to see if the company will profit from Q10 sales.
BlackBerry (BBRY) also announced it has scrapped plans to offer its new BlackBerry 10 operating system on its PlayBook tablet.
Credits: ctvnews.ca
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