Stock of the day 18/12/2014 – Blackberry Ltd

Blackberry will be looking for a (Black)merry Christmas as it announces its Q£ fiscal 2015 earnings release tomorrow.

The once ubiquitous handheld device company has suffered in recent times, and has had a pretty volatile 2014, with the announcement in March of $5.9 billion in losses.

It opened the year with share prices of $7.66, and had reached its yearly low by April, hitting $7.02. The stocks had rallied by July, culminating in a 2014 high of $12.54 in mid-November. However it has been a big fall from grace for Blackberry, which can only dream of its $160 per share highs of 6 years ago.



Its last earnings release came in September, with earnings per share of only $0.02, and a 41.8% drop in revenue. Blackberry’s stocks were very volatile around this last release, falling and rising 5% in the day before, and of, the announcement. This quarter is expected to bring in earnings of $0.05 per share, alongside revenue of $959.54 million.

Apple’s iPhone is a permanent thorn in the side of Blackberry, and has been one of the major reasons for the company’s smartphone woes, and has caused Blackberry to attempt to diversify slightly. The launch of the Blackberry Passport, a phone/tablet hybrid, in September saw healthy sales, especially over the Black Friday weekend. However the company also saw some embarrassing PR, offering to pay iPhone customers nearly $600 dollars to switch to the Passport. You can’t imagine Apple having to extend the same offer in the other direction.

Today saw another new product announcement, the Blackberry Classic. This smartphone, complete with QWERTY keyboard a la the old Blackberry phones, is an attempt by new CEO John Chen to take the company back to its smartphone roots, back to a time when Blackberry was a market leader. It remains to be seen whether there is a demand for this old-school design, or whether Blackberry are flogging the proverbial dead horse.

At this point in time, Blackberry will see breaking even, and a stemming of revenue fall, as a major positive, and a sign of better things to come in 2015.With an Android-security project in the works with Samsung, the company is making efforts to move away from a smartphone-dependency. This latest earnings release will provide another indicator of whether the Blackberry brand is already too tainted to survive.