Things have been going poorly for BlackBerry for a while now but the past quarter might have been its worst yet. Not only is the company losing money hand-over-fist, but its quarterly revenues collapsed to $1.2 billion, a stunningly low number for a company that was once at the top of the smartphone market. The Guardian’s Charles Arthur has posted a chart tracking BlackBerry’s quarterly revenue over the past several years and the sharp, rapid drop in revenues since their peak in 2011 is truly a sight to behold.
What makes this really remarkable is that the company’s revenue collapse only accelerated this year after it released devices based on BlackBerry 10, the mobile platform that was supposed to be its savior. BlackBerry announced in its quarterly earnings report Friday that the majority of the smartphones sold on the quarter were based on the legacy BlackBerry 7 operating system, which means that there’s almost no demand for BlackBerry 10 devices anywhere.
The company should see an uptick in BlackBerry 10 adoption next year once Foxconn starts pumping out BB10 devices next year but it’s pretty clear that BlackBerry has been handily defeated by Microsoft in the race to become the world’s No. 3 mobile platform. New CEO John Chen has his work cut out for him.
