BlackBerry announced its outsourcing deal with Foxconn to launch new smartphones for emerging telecom markets.
Indonesia is likely to be the first emerging mobile market to receive the latest smartphone — in early 2014 — from the BlackBerry-Foxconn association.
BlackBerry will introduce the smartphone in other emerging markets as well. Foxxcon is well known for producing high quality, cost effective phones.
The decision to partner with Foxconn, which manufactures phones for smartphone vendors such as Apple, has put an end to the speculation that BlackBerry will exit from smartphone business for retail consumers.
As per the five-year partnership, BlackBerry will focus on design, security, software development and enterprise mobility management.
John Chen, CEO of BlackBerry, said: “We will address fast-growing markets leveraging Foxconn’s scale and efficiency that will allow us to compete more effectively.”
Foxconn will manufacture products for BlackBerry at facilities in Indonesia and Mexico. BlackBerry will own its intellectual property and perform product assurance on devices through the Foxconn partnership, as it does currently with all third-party manufacturers.
BlackBerry financial result
Meanwhile, BlackBerry’s revenue for the third quarter of 2013 decreased 56 percent to $1.2 billion compared to the same quarter last year. The revenue is from approximately 1.9 million smartphones in Q3 compared to 3.7 million smartphones in Q2. Most of these phones were BlackBerry 7 devices, indicating that BlackBerry 10 phones were a disaster.
BlackBerry said the revenue breakdown for the quarter was approximately 40 percent for hardware, 53 percent for services and 7 percent for software and other revenue.
Revenue contribution from North America increased to 28.5 percent in Q3 from 26.3 in Q2, EMEA region contributed 46 percent (43.6 percent), Latin America 11.3 percent (12.5 percent) and Asia Pacific 14.2 percent (17.6 percent).
Revenue contribution from Asia Pacific which includes telecom markets such as Indonesia, India, China, etc. reduced by 3.4 percent during the third quarter, which saw the induction of a new management team and roll out of new strategies at BlackBerry.
Loss from continuing operations for the quarter was $4.4 billion, or $8.37 per share diluted.
Adjusted loss has increased to $354 million compared with loss of $248 million in the prior quarter.
BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 (BES10) received over 30,000 commercial and test servers installations till now against 25,000 in September 2013.
BBM messaging received over 40 million newly registered iOS/Android users in the last 60 days.
During the quarter, BlackBerry sold approximately 4.3 million BlackBerry smartphones to end customers, which included shipments made and recognized prior to the third quarter and which reduced the company’s inventory in channel. Of the BlackBerry smartphones sold to end customers in the third quarter, approximately 3.2 million were BlackBerry 7 devices.
