Back on track? BlackBerry makes $98M in Q4

Updated Canada’s ailing smartphone giant appears to be on the road to recovery.

BlackBerry released its fourth quarter results this morning and they show some hopeful signs for the future. And while it was better than expected, it was not enough for tech analysts to proclaim a full recovery.

They did post a fourth quarter profit of some $98 million — a sharp turnaround from a loss of $125 million just a year ago — and they did return 22 cents a share to investors, but there are still some tough times ahead for the company.

BlackBerry cut nearly 5,000 jobs, and a billion dollars from expenses, and has a cash reserve of nearly $3 billion, but there are no numbers yet from the American launch last week of BlackBerry’s Z10.

The company shipped nearly a million units of its new phone in the last quarter. While that is good, communications and tech analyst Terry Flynn of McMaster University says it’s nowhere near the number Apple shipped over the same period.

“The stock price is up 25 percent year over year so, there are some good signals, but it’s like the Leafs: they’ve still got a long ways to go. They’re not going to displace the Pittsburgh Penguins. Apple shipped out 50-million of their iPhones in the last quarter.”

“50 million to one million, they’ve still got a long way to go and they have lost three million subscribers over the last quarter, and it’s a really competitive marketplace. Samsung has just launched their new Galaxy version, and so, for them to really kind of get to that market leadership place they’ve really got to start to focus on new innovations.”

The company is hoping that its new Q10 model, will continue the momentum of the last quarter. The product is on track for an April launch.

Flynn adds there are clear signs of a corporate “culture-change” with Torsten Heins at the helm and that too is encouraging for investors.