BlackBerry Could Ship 40 Million Handsets in 2013

could ship an extremely large number of smartphones this year.

The ailing smartphone maker -- which fell to third place after

iPhone and

Android platform debuted -- has reportedly experienced a fair amount of growth this quarter. If that growth is maintained, it could result in a significant sales increase in 2013. According to

, BlackBerry could ship 30 million to 40 million handsets this year. Despite the (potentially) good news, BlackBerry shares are down more than two percent this afternoon. The stock is up more than 23 percent this year, however, as investors continue to buy into company's potential as a mobile phone maker. With so many Android devices on the market (and millions of additional units manufactured every year), it may be impossible for BlackBerry 10, iOS 7 or any other operating system to catch up. While Apple dominates the U.S. market for producing the single most popular device, its overall market share is far lower than Android. As of September 2012, Google claimed that

were activated every single day. That was a huge increase over the June activation numbers, which reached

. At the same time, Apple typically sells around

. The company actually sold more than that over the last two quarters, but sales are expected to decline in the June quarter as consumers wait for the iPhone 5S to arrive. It is possible that the same has happened to BlackBerry. When BB10 was released earlier this year, only the Z10 was available. The Q10 will ship to

and

stores on

. It should be interesting to see how the new platform performs once the keyboard-equipped iteration is released.