On Wednesday, Canada’s BlackBerry Ltd came posting slightly beating profits but remained unsuccessful to made sales in its biggest business up to the expectations as demand for its security software from companies and government agencies saw a downtrend that hurt company’s sales.
Once famous for its phone sets, the Waterloo, Ontario-based BlackBerry after facing tough competition from the rivals like Apple Inc and other Android phone makers, saw its growth dwindling in early this decade which caused the company to find more suitable and stable revenue sources. Resultantly, BlackBerry adopted a business transformation strategy and diverted its focus on selling software to mobile phone makers and auto industry to be used in their products while it is also supplying technology, mastered at the time of making phones, to companies for development of autonomous vehicles.
BlackBerry’s enterprise software and technology solutions segments are housed in Internet of Things business, and revenue from those segments succeeded to post a rise of only 5 percent to reach $137 million whereas, according to IBES data from Refinitiv, analysts were expecting it to be $151.4 million.
Steven Li, an analyst at Raymond James, described the IoT of the BlackBerry as underperforming saying that the revenue from technology solution usually shows growth with stability and any shortfall in that revenue would be impacted by decline in revnue from enterprise software.
During the quarter ended May 31, company’s adjusted rose by 23 percent to $267 million overall, including the benefit from recent acquisition of cybersecurity firm Cylance, bought in February for $1.4 billion.
Li said that if we exclude the revenue from Cylance in the first quarter, company’s revenue was pointing downward.
BlackBerry succeeded to narrow its net loss to $35 million, or 9 cents per share which was $60 million, or 11 cents per share, in the same quarter last year.
Company also posted earnings of 1 cent per share as was expecting the analysts also.
