The inevitable has finally happened. Last year, BlackBerry CEO John Chen has warned that should BlackBerry’s hardware continue to post losses to the company, BlackBerry would quit the smartphone market. BlackBerry’s latest quarterly financial report has showned that the BlackBerry smartphones continue to be a loss for the company, and as such, BlackBerry has announced that it will cease smartphone production starting from today.
According to this quarterly financial report, it appears that BlackBerry’s Mobility Solutions division posted an USD8 million loss for the past quarter. While BlackBerry will no longer be producing smartphones of its own, the company will be outsourcing smartphone production to its partners. What this means is that there will still be new BlackBerry smartphones released, it just won’t be designed by BlackBerry themselves. For example, the recent BlackBerry DTEK50 was essentially a modified Alcatel device. The company announced that it has already licensed the name to an Indonesian firm that will build and sell BlackBerry-branded devices in the region, so BlackBerry smartphones will still be around.
On the bright side, BlackBerry’s software division remains profitable, with the company posting an 89% year-over-year growth in GAAP software and service revenues.
Source: BlackBerry, Engadget