BlackBerry announced a partnership with Foxconn to make BlackBerry devices in six or seven key markets. Foxconn is a contract manufacturer well-known for making Apple's iPhones.
Foxconn will start out by making a low-cost, 3G BlackBerry handset for the Indonesian market that will debut in the spring of 2014.
The partnership news came on top of the earnings report for BlackBerry's fiscal third quarter, which was one of the company's worst quarters ever for handset shipments.
- BlackBerry recorded a historically-low 1.9 million smartphone shipments during the quarter.
- That's down almost 75% compared to the 7.3 million shipments in the same quarter a year ago. That is also down significantly from the 3.7 million smartphones shipped in the prior quarter.
- BlackBerry reported a whopping $4.4 billion operating loss that can be attributed primarily to unsold smartphones.
Worryingly, even BlackBerry's new software, BlackBerry 10, continues to underperform.
About 4.3 million BlackBerry devices were sold to end users during the quarter. But, almost 75% of those devices sold ran on the superseded BlackBerry 7 OS instead of the newer operating system.
With BlackBerry smartphone shipments dwindling with each passing quarter, the Foxconn partnership affords BlackBerry some breathing room to focus on software and services, since it will mean offloading expensive manufacturing operations. The company's previous potential bid to go private failed.
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