BlackBerry 10 phone sales remain stable

BlackBerry sold 1.1 million BlackBerry 10 devices in December last year and January and February this year. That is as many as in the previous period; most manufacturers see their sales drop significantly in January and February.

The sale of devices with the older BlackBerry 7 did decrease considerably, from 3.4 to 2.3 million devices. With sales of 1.1 million BlackBerry 10 devices, the manufacturer is likely to hold on to a market share of below 0.5 percent of the smartphone market, much less than the competing platforms Android, iOS and Windows Phone.

It is likely that sales of BlackBerry 10 devices held up in the first months of the year due to the release in November of the new Z30 and price reductions of the old Z10. The latter costed around 600 euros at release about a year ago, now it is generally available for between 200 and 250 euros.

BlackBerry made a loss of 308 million euros, but according to the company that was mainly due to one-off payments; if the company does not include it, the loss is much lower. BlackBerry makes just over a third of its money from phone sales; the rest comes from services and software. Turnover amounts to just over 700 million euros, two-thirds less than the same quarter a year ago.

BlackBerry CEO John Chen said in a statement to the quarterly results that the company is considering extending its chat service BBM to desktops. This would allow business customers to start conversations on the desktop and finish them on the go via phones. BBM now works on smartphones with BlackBerry OS, Android and iOS.