BlackBerry confirms $965mn quarterly loss over poor sales

BlackBerry has reportedly confirmed its 965 million dollar second quarter net loss close to what it predicted last week. The sinking smartphone company, following a slump in sales had warned investors that it would report a loss of up to a billion dollars and had also announced 4,500 job cuts across the company.

According to the BBC, BlackBerry agreed to a deal led by Canada’s Warren Buffet Prem Watsa for 4.7 billion dollars, however, it said that it would still continue to explore other options while negotiations with Fairfax continued.

BlackBerry’s CEO Thorsten Heins said that the company was very disappointed with their operational and financial results this quarter and announced a series of major changes to address the competitive hardware environment and their cost structure. The report said that the latest smartphone’s sales were so poor that Blackberry had to write off 934 million dollars in the second quarter to account for the weakness.

The firm reported total sales of 1.6 billion dollars compared with 3.1billion dollars in the same quarter of 2012, accounting to a near 50percent fall.

Colin Gillis from the brokers BGC, said that the results were ‘startling weak’ and even if the decision is focused on retooling the company into a niche enterprise focused business, the decision seems years too late.