BlackBerry Licensing Growth Offsets Revenue Decline

BlackBerry’s software and technology revenue has increased by 150 percent over the past year and now accounts for a fifth of its income, boosting confidence in the company’s revival despite a wider than expected lost and a year-on-year fall in total revenue.

The unit contributed $137m (£87m) to overall revenues of $658m (£481m) for the first quarter of fiscal 2016, but shareholders were impressed despite a wider than expected loss.

The Canadian firm secured 2,600 new enterprise customers during the period and recognised revenues on 1.1 million handsets with an average cost of $240 (£152), boosted by the launch of the BlackBerry Leap earlier this year.

BlackBerry results

It says 45 percent of all licensing agreements associated with its new deals were cross-platform arrangements, adding legitimacy to its recent strategy of targeting as many platforms of possible with services like BlackBerry Experience suite, BES 12 Cloud and Android for Work integrations.

Devices account for 40 percent of revenue, while services generated 38 percent.

“I am pleased with the strong performance of our software and technology business. This is key to BlackBerry’s future growth,” said CEO John Chen. “Our financials reflect increased investments to sales and customer support for our software business. In addition, we are taking steps to make the handset business profitable. We believe these actions are prudent and necessary to grow the business and we believe the remaining milestones in our strategic plan are achievable.”

At Mobile World Congress (MWC) earlier this year, Chen spoke of his desire for BlackBerry to manage “anything with an IP” and that he was hopeful for the company’s future following a disastrous few years which saw the firm toppled as the leader in the enterprise smartphone market.