Results: BlackBerry needs a miracle to meet its annual handset sales goal

Struggling handset manufacturer BlackBerry on Friday released its third-quarter earnings results, which pundits largely chalked up as a big win. Losses, at three cents a share, were milder than the analyst-anticipated 14-cent drop. It was an eagerly awaited update, revealing sales numbers for BlackBerry’s buzz-generating Priv smartphone — the company’s first to run Google’s Android. But during the call, there was a disconnect between the optimistic note CEO John Chen struck, and the actual data contained in (and conspicuously omitted from) the report. “My first goal is to get us into a break-even position with the device business, because you really couldn’t do anything strategically with a business that continues to lose money,” said Chen, as reported by Re/code. “We’re in that ballpark now.” From VentureBeat Customers don’t just get irritated when you screw up cross-channel personalization. They jump ship. Find out how to save your bacon on this free research-based webinar with Insight’s Andrew Jones. Sounds like, in its first month of sales (only 22 days, from November 6 – 28), Blackberry’s Priv was a runaway hit — something we’d heard soon after launch through scattered reports of quick sellouts and limited availability. Conflicting information But if Blackberry’s hardware division is really riding Priv’s coattails so successfully, why was this the first time in at least 19 quarters — dating back to 2012 — that BlackBerry didn’t break out device sales figures to lead its press release? Possibly that’s because the company sold fewer total handsets last quarter than it ever has before: just 700,000. (Some sources are citing that figure as the number of Privs sold, but we verified the number with BlackBerry.) That means Blackberry sold just a hair over 2.5 million handsets during the first three fiscal quarters of 2016. Despite Chen’s assertion yesterday that the hardware division would attain profitability in the next quarter or two, he told The Verge back in October that the break even number was around five million devices annually.