BlackBerry Beats Earnings Estimates, Expects To Be Profitable Next Year

Shares of BlackBerry Ltd BBRY gained more than 4 percent early Friday morning after the company reported a $0.04 per share profit in the fourth quarter, marking an improvement from a $0.03 per share loss a year ago.

Revenue for the quarter was $297 million (GAAP revenue of $286 million), of which 80 percent of sales came from Software & Services segment revenue.

Total cash and cash equivalents rose by $89 million to around $1.7 billion as of February 28, 2017. This reflects free cash flow of $16 million, which includes a cash flow from operations of $19 million.

Looking forward to fiscal 2018, BlackBerry expects to grow its business at or above the overall market in the software business. The company expects to be profitable on a non-GAAP basis and to generate positive free cash flow for the full fiscal year.

"In our areas of strategic focus, we are executing well and gaining traction," BlackBerry's CEO John Chen said. "In our enterprise business, we had one of our best-ever software billings quarters, driven by strength across regulated and non-regulated industries. Enhancing our position in public sector, we recently achieved FedRAMP certification for the U.S. government. In IOT appliances, we won new business and secured six new customer trials for Radar. We demonstrated our autonomous driving technology platform at CES 2017.

"In mobile software licensing, we signed our third major agreement, and we now have global coverage. We are entering the next phase in sub-licensing our secure software to a variety of new mobile endpoints. We also entered the CPaaS market with the launch of our BBM Enterprise Software Development Kit, which will expand our addressable opportunity in a high growth segment."

The stock traded at $7.25, up 4.3 percent in Friday's pre-market session.

See Also:

5 Stocks To Watch For March 31, 2017

Earnings Scheduled For March 31, 2017