BlackBerry makes small profit in light of internal shakeups

BlackBerry has achieved a net profit of $23m (approximately £13.5m) with revenue of $966m in three months from May until the end of March 2014. This profit is an improvement on last year’s loss of $84m in June of 2013.

The firm’s CEO John Chen claims this demonstration of growth indicates changes being made are setting the firm back on track.

He said: “Over the past six months, we have focused on improving efficiency in all aspects of our operations to drive cost reductions and margin improvement. Looking forward, we are focusing on our growth plan to enable our return to profitability.”

The results come in light of massive executive shakeups at BlackBerry over the last six months, where the firm appointed new interim CEO John Chen late last year, as well as new UK managing director Alexandra Zagury.

Earlier this month, BlackBerry announced that the new BlackBerry 10.3 operating system, available later this year, will allow users to access the Amazon Appstore, expanding the number of available applications by more than 240,000.

However, earlier this month, regional managing director for BlackBerry in Europe, Markus Mueller, explained that the firm planned to re-focus on the enterprise space.

He said: “We are pivoting towards enterprise, but we have never left enterprise. Maybe at some point we did step a foot into the consumer market, maybe a little bit too far, and we’re actually maybe pulling back from that a little bit.”