Things continue to get tougher for BlackBerry. The Canadian phone maker has just released its financials for its fiscal fourth quarter, and the results show that the company only managed to sell 600,000 units of its smartphones over the three-month period. The 600,000 unit sales fall short of Wall Street’s expectations, which predicted that BlackBerry would hit 850,000 units for the quarter. Furthermore, the latest results also mark a decrease from the 700,000 units BlackBerry sold in the previous quarter.
When BlackBerry launched the Priv, its first smartphone that runs on Google’s Android mobile operating system, back in November last year, the company had hoped to inject some life into its steadily dropping sales. But apparently, the release of the BlackBerry Priv was not enough to improve its sales numbers. It certainly did not help that the BlackBerry only worked with only a limited number of wireless carriers. It is currently sold by AT&T, with T-Mobile started pushing the device in January, and Verizon Wireless began offering it just recently. As for Sprint, it is not selling the BlackBerry Priv handset yet.
Still, Sprint CEO John Chen has expressed some optimism regarding the latest results. Chen even went as far as defending the sales numbers, saying that BlackBerry was able to decrease its operating loss by half. In total, the Canadian phone maker registered a fiscal fourth quarter loss amounting to $238 million, or $0.45 per share, on revenues of $464 million.
However, Chen also said that there is still some work to be done -- in order to break even, the company still needs to sell 3 million units of its smartphones in 2016. Obviously, this will not be easy, considering that by releasing the Priv Android phone, BlackBerry has pitted itself against Android mobile giants such as Samsung and LG. It will certainly be difficult competing with Samsung’s Galaxy S7 and LG’s G5 devices.