Blackberry sells 700,000 devices, but revenue still drops $236 million in fiscal Q3

Blackberry is discussing fiscal Q3 2016 numbers in a shareholders’ conference call today, and the company revealed some very interesting news. Blackberry seems to have sold as much as 700,000 units this quarter. Unfortunately the company wasn’t able to disclose how much of that could be attributed to the Blackberry PRIV, though considering it enjoyed just 3 weeks of time on the market that quarter it’s probably not an overwhelming majority.

That performance wasn’t enough to keep the company’s revenue from dropping by $236 million — a 30% year-on-year decrease — but oddly enough shareholders are very happy about that. The original expectation was that Blackberry would lose a ton more with losses translating to as much as 14 cents per share, but they were able to beat Wall Street’s expectations and post a much more palatable loss of 3 cents per share.

Blackberry shares jumped 8% as a result, though the year-to-date drop of 25% is still certain to be unpleasant for many shareholders. So why should any of them celebrate?

Well, it shows the Waterloo company is on the mend. Their decision to deploy a bold strategy like releasing an Android phone might have hurt the pride of those who dreamt of Blackberry using in-house technology exclusively, but opting to penetrate an established market for the sake of improving numbers seems to have been the right move going forward.

It seems Blackberry understood the need to diversify very early on. The company was already making moves for the future by opening up the Blackberry Enterprise Server suite to Android, which would have served as a nice safety net in case their hardware business became unsustainable.

Any doubts about Blackberry’s new strategy in the early going might need to be suppressed, but we’ll have to get a clearer picture of the company’s long-term plans before they’re completely vindicated by shareholders. As for the consumers? It does make it all the more likely that Blackberry will go forward with supposed plans to launch a second Android-based Blackberry phone down the line, and for their sake we hope it’s something that’ll really shake the market up.