An employee holds a new BlackBerry Ltd. Leap smartphone
Pau Barrena/Bloomberg
BlackBerry stock is trading lower late Tuesday after the company posted disappointing results for its fiscal fourth quarter ended Feb. 28.
For the quarter, the former mobile-phone company, now focused on software for both security and the automotive market, posted revenue of $215 million on a non-GAAP basis—or $210 million under generally accepted accounting principles. The GAAP figure was down 26% from a year ago, and below the Street consensus forecast of $245 million.
In announcing results, BlackBerry (ticker: BB) said that during the quarter the company entered negotiations for an unidentified “North American entity” to buy part of its patent portfolio related to mobile devices, messaging, and wireless networks. The company said that it limited patent-monetization activity in the quarter given those negotiations. BlackBerry said that if that had not been in the case, licensing revenue would have been higher.
The company posted a non-GAAP profit in the quarter of 3 cents a share, in line with Street estimates. On a GAAP basis, the company lost 56 cents a share, due primarily to a non-cash accounting adjustment on its convertible debentures of about 46 cents a share.
For the full year, BlackBerry had revenue of $919 million on a non-GAAP basis, or $893 million on a GAAP basis.
“This has been an exceptional year to navigate, however we are pleased with QNX’s continued recovery [a reference to the company’s operating system software for the automotive market], despite new challenges from the global chip shortage,” BlackBerry CEO John Chen said in a statement. “QNX now has design wins with 23 of the world’s top 25 electric-vehicle original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and remains on course to return to a normal revenue run rate by mid-fiscal 2022.
BlackBerry stock in late trading is down 4.7% to $8.90.
Write to Eric J. Savitz at [email protected]
