BlackBerry Company Earnings Vanish, Outlook Is No Better

The smartphone maker reported an adjusted diluted earnings per share (EPS) loss of $0.13 on revenues of $3.07 billion. In the same period a year ago, BlackBerry reported an EPS loss of $0.99 on revenue of $2.81 billion. This morning’s results also compare to consensus estimates for EPS of $0.06 and $3.36 billion in revenue.

On an GAAP basis, the company posted an EPS loss of $0.16, which does not include pre-tax charges of $26 million for the company’s Cost Optimization and Resource Efficiency program.

The company shipped 6.8 million BlackBerry smartphones in the first quarter. That total includes the touchscreen Z10 and all other BlackBerry phones on the company’s roster. Most estimates for shipments of older model phones came in at around 5 million units, which puts Z10 shipments at around 2 million. The range of estimates for Z10 shipments started at around 2.7 million and went as high as 5 million units. That did not happen. Not even close really.

The company’s CEO said:

During the first quarter, we continued to focus our efforts on the global roll out of the BlackBerry10 platform. We are still in the early stages of this launch, but already, the BlackBerry 10 platform and BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 are proving themselves to customers to be very secure, flexible and dynamic mobile computing solutions. Over the next three quarters, we will be increasing our investments to support the roll out of new products and services, and to demonstrate that BlackBerry has established itself as a leading and vibrant player in next generation mobile computing solutions for both consumer and enterprise customers.

At the end of the fourth quarter, BlackBerry expected to post a break-even first quarter, even as it boosted its marketing spending by 50% to support the Z10. The company’s outlook for the rest of the fiscal year is poor. Without giving numbers, BlackBerry expects to post another loss in the second quarter.

Gross margins slipped to 33.9% in the first quarter, from 40.1% in the fourth quarter, but were higher than the 28% gross margin posted in the first quarter a year ago. The company did not report subscriber numbers, which leads one to believe that the number fell below the 76 million reported in the fourth quarter of 2014.

Shares are down more than 19% in premarket trading, at $11.60 in a 52-week range of $6.22 to $18.32. The consensus analyst price target was around $11.00 before today’s results were announced.