Quarterly figures from Research in Motion reveal that the company’s revenue has fallen by 47% year-on-year to $2.7 billion (£1.7 billion), while net profit for the quarter was down from $265 million in Q3 2011 to $14 million this year. However, the profit figure shows an improvement from a $229 million loss in the previous quarter.

Around 60% of quarterly revenue came from hardware, 36% from services and 4% for software and other revenue.

RIM shipped approximately 6.9 million BlackBerry smartphones and 255,000 BlackBerry PlayBook tablets during the quarter, ending the quarter with around 79 million BlackBerry users worldwide.

Alongside the results, RIM announced that Robin Bienfait, its Chief Information Officer, was planning to retire at the end of the year.

Thorsten Heins, President and CEO of RIM, said “RIM continued to execute on its product roadmap plans and to deliver on key financial metrics as it gets set for the global launch of BlackBerry 10. During the third quarter, we continued to demonstrate our strong financial position, generating $950 million in cash flow from operations, and increasing our cash position significantly to more than $2.9 billion. More than 150 carriers are currently completing technical acceptance programs for the first BlackBerry 10 products, and beta trials of BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 are underway at more than 120 enterprises including 64 Fortune 500 companies. This is an exciting time and our carrier partners, application developers and employees are all looking forward to unveiling the innovation and excitement of BlackBerry 10 to our customers on January 30, 2013.”

RIM’s results cover the three months until 1st December 2012.