Research In Motion has reported its third quarter results for the three months until 26th November 2011. It says 14.1 BlackBerry smartphones were shipped in the quarter, along with 150,000 PlayBook tablets. In total, there are now around 75 million BlackBerry users worldwide.
Quarterly revenue was $5.2 billion (£3.4 billion), up 24% from $4.2 billion in the previous quarter but down 6% year-on-year. Around 79% of the revenue came from hardware, 19% from service and 2% from software.
Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, co-CEOs at Research In Motion, said “Despite the challenges faced in the third quarter, the BlackBerry subscriber base grew to almost 75 million customers around the world. In addition, RIM launched a range of new BlackBerry 7 based smartphones globally and introduced holiday promotions that helped drive growth in the installed base of BlackBerry PlayBook users. RIM continues to have strong technology, unique service capabilities and a large installed base of customers, and we are more determined than ever to capitalize on our strengths to overcome the recent execution challenges surrounding product launches and the resulting financial performance. As part of our commitment to improving our performance to better meet the expectations of shareholders and customers, we continue to evaluate ways to improve in several areas of the Company’s operations. It may take some time to realize the benefits of these efforts and the platform transition that we are undertaking, but we continue to believe that RIM has the right set of strengths and capabilities to maintain a leading role in the mobile communications industry.”
RIM notes there’s a $54 million charge ($40 million after tax) related to the service interruption earlier this year, a $485 million charge ($356 million after tax) for the PlayBook inventory provision announced a couple of weeks ago and $7 million ($6 million after tax) for its cost optimisation programme.
Shipments in the current quarter are expected to be between 11 million and 12 million units.