Maybe there’s some life left in the old girl…
Per AppleInsider, BlackBerry on Thursday said demand for its new flagship Z10 handset helped produce a net income of US$98 million — a minor surprise during a transitional quarter for the previously spiraling company.
While the Canadian smartphone maker, formerly known as Research in Motion, surprised by posting a profit, its quarterly revenue of US$2.7 billion was still seen as a disappointment. In addition, the company only sold 6 million total smartphones, while a million of those were its new Z10.
A poll of Wall Street analysts by Thomson Reuters had forecast BlackBerry to post a loss of about 29 cents per share. In the same quarter a year ago, the company had lost US$118 million.
Still, the Z10 sales were a relatively positive sign for the company’s revamped BlackBerry 10 platform. That device launched a few weeks before the end of the quarter, and only in Canada, the U.K. and United Arab Emirates. It began expanding to the U.S. last week.
While BlackBerry was once a dominant player in the smartphone market, major shifts in recent years have made it a fringe competitor. For example, Apple sold nearly eight times as many iPhones last quarter as BlackBerry sold smartphones in its latest print, demonstrating the gap between the two companies.
As of the end of the company’s fourth fiscal quarter of 2013, which concluded on March 2, BlackBerry had about US$2.9 billion in cash, cash equivalents, short-term and long-term investments.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.