One day after announcing a new facility to develop autonomous vehicles, BlackBerry Ltd. has revealed that less than 25 per cent of its revenue is now related to mobile devices.
According to its latest quarterly earnings report, posted Tuesday, approximately 55 per cent of the company’s revenue during the three-month period ending on Nov. 30 came from its software and services segment, while an additional 22 per cent came from service access fees. Only 23 per cent came from mobility solutions.
The results highlight BlackBerry’s success in pivoting from a hardware-driven company to a software-driven one, CEO John Chen said, with the company on track to reach its goal of growing software and services revenue during the total fiscal year by 30 per cent.
While the third quarter itself wasn’t profitable for BlackBerry, with the company reporting non-adjusted revenue of $289 million USD, along with a non-adjusted net loss of $117 million USD, the company is on track to reach profitability for the full fiscal year, Chen said – and, in fact, is raising its projections for 2017.
“We now expect to achieve [non-adjusted earnings per share] profitability for the full year, up from a prior range of break-even to a five cent loss,” Chen said in a Dec. 20 statement. “This is the third consecutive quarter we have increased our [earnings per share] outlook, reflecting the traction we are achieving in our shift to a software business model.”
Back in September, during its second-quarter earnings meeting, BlackBerry announced that it would be officially exiting the hardware market after posting a $372 million USD quarterly loss, although its COO later clarified to ITBusiness.ca that the company’s phones wouldn’t disappear from the market; they would simply be developed by a third party.
While BlackBerry’s flagship smartphone for 2016, the DTEK50, was well-received, the company has made a noticeable effort to shift to the software market ever since Chen came aboard, inking deals such as a recent agreement to develop in-car software with car manufacturer Ford while continuing its efforts to develop the most secure version of Google’s Android software available.
In his Dec. 20 statement, Chen emphasized that “BlackBerry is now a software company and the market leader in mobile security,” and that “as the number of mobile-connected devices continues to proliferate, we expect growing demand in our areas of strength, including security and embedded software.”
He also called October’s deal with Ford “proof” of the company’s increasing “value proposition” outside the mobile hardware arena.