BlackBerry, in the midst of transitioning from a hardware to a software company, topped Wall Street expectations with its latest earnings report announced this morning. For the fourth fiscal quarter which ended on February 28th, the company grew its top line by 12.2% to $193 million. BlackBerry has turned over design, production, marketing and sales of BlackBerry phones over to companies like China's TCL. BlackBerry provides the software and collects a royalty based on sales.

The company also is involved with providing software to the IoT. It sells industrial software to manufacturers, and helps corporations monitor their mobile fleet with Mobile Device Management tools like BlackBerry UEM (formerly known as BES12). The company said today that it had 3,500 enterprise orders during the three-month quarter. During the period, BlackBerry reported a net loss of $47 million, or 10 cents a share. These figures represent an improvement over last year's fourth quarter net loss of 45 cents a share or $238 million. Not including certain one-time items, BlackBerry turned a 4 cents a share profit. That topped Wall Street expectation calling for BlackBerry to breakeven for the quarter.

BlackBerry CEO John Chen said that the company will throw off positive cash flow during the current fiscal year that ends in February 2018. He also said that the company will be profitable in the current fiscal year on an adjusted basis. There was a bit of bad news released by BlackBerry today as the company announced a delay in the launch of its last home-grown handset, the BlackBerry KEYone. Originally expected to be launched in April, the device is now expected to be released in May.

"Looking ahead to fiscal 2018, we expect to grow at or above the overall market in our software business."-John Chen, CEO, BlackBerry

Despite the news about the KEYone delay, investors have been buying BlackBerry's shares. The stock is up over 13% in today's trading to $7.87.

By: DocMemory
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