BlackBerry announced on Thursday that demand for its new Z10 handset helped it come away with a quarterly net income of $98 million. The company sold 1 million of the new Z10s.
While the Canadian smartphone maker, formerly known as Research in Motion, surprised by posting a profit, its quarterly revenue of $2.7 billion was still seen as a disappointment. In addition, the company only sold 6 million total smartphones, while a million of those were its new Z10.
A poll of Wall Street analysts by Thomson Reuters had forecast BlackBerry to post a loss of about 29 cents per share. In the same quarter a year ago, the company had lost $118 million.
The Z10 sales were a positive sign for the revamped BlackBerry 10 platform. The device was launched a few weeks before the end of the quarter in Canada, the UK, and United Arab Emirates. It expanded to the U.S. last week.
BlackBerry was once the hundred pound gorilla in the smartphone market, but competition from Apple and Android devices led to a major drop in BlackBerry sales.
“We have implemented numerous changes at BlackBerry over the past year and those changes have resulted in the company returning to profitability in the fourth quarter,” said Thorsten Heins, BlackBerry’s president and CEO. “With the launch of BlackBerry 10, we have introduced the newest and what we believe to be the most innovative mobile computing platform in the market today. Customers love the device and the user experience, and our teams and partners are now focused on getting those devices into the hands of BlackBerry consumer and enterprise customers.”
As BlackBerry’s fourth fiscal quarter of 2013 concluded on March 2, the company had about $2.9 billion in cash, cash equivalents, short-term and long-term investments.
