BlackBerry is coming back: latest results show profit, at last

Lots of people have been worrying about the veteran smartphone company. But it seems to be doing better

Thorsten Heins, and Alicia Keys (BlackBerry 10, 2013) (AFP)

BlackBerry has long been left in the shade by more sexy mobile rivals including Apple and Samsung, despite having got there first. But the company’s results, released today, seem to show that the company is slowly on its way back.

The company reported a loss of $148 million, compared with $4.4 billion in the same period last year. (Most of that came from the company taking a loss on several of its businesses.)

But stripping out another exceptional cost, the company actually made $6 million.

That was despite revenues falling to $793 million, from $1.2 billion.

The company has a new chief executive, John Chen, who has cut costs aggressively and focused on security as a selling point of the company’s phones. It released a new model this week, the BlackBerry Classic, an updated version of the BlackBerrys of old in an attempt to win back customers who still favour the firm’s old phones.