Blackberry Z10 sales fail to impress analysts
Early forecasts being revised downward
It’s no exaggeration to say that the future of BlackBerry, the renamed Research in Motion, is hanging on success of its new BlackBerry smartphones, the Q10 and, particularly, the Z10. Revised forecasts from a number of market watchers suggest the troubled company has not yet put its woes behind it.
Earlier this week, two analysts - Pacific Crest’s James Faucette and Canaccord Genuity’s Mike Walkley - separately revised their tallies for the total number of Z10s sold during the current quarter downward. Both estimate around 300,000 Z10s will have been sold worldwide by the end of March.
Walkley had previously forecast 1.75 million Z10s will be sold, but “follow-up checks have indicated steady but modest sales levels”.
Faucette added: “We continue to believe the Z10 launch involves relatively small shipment volumes and only moderate sell-through so far in markets which have historically been some of BlackBerry’s strongest.”
Both believe incoming Android phones - Walkley mentioned the Samsung Galaxy S IV, but there's the new HTC One too - will make it very hard for Blackberry to shift lots of Z10s. What it does sell, suggested Faucette, will come at the cost of Bold 9900 sales “which our checks indicate have declined materially since the Z10’s launch”. In short, the Z10 isn’t going to boost Blackberry’s overall sales significantly.
Not every analyst has such a bleak view. Peter Misek of Jefferies & Co reckons Z10 sales will top 500,000 units during the quarter, though that’s still well below the million-plus forecasts other analysts have made - and well below Walkley’s previous prediction.
Misek said his checks showed the Z10 selling out at various locations, though Walkley insisted “limited initial supply [was] cited as the reason for early post-launch stock-outs at some carrier stores rather than overwhelming demand”. Other analysts have said the same thing.
US carriers aren’t going to be selling subsidised Z10s until mid-March, but once they do, sales will leap, Misek suggested, to 4 million units worldwide during April, May and June combined. He admitted that figure is above the Wall Street average, which Faucette put at 3-4 million for Q2. Faucette himself reckons Blackberry will shift only 1-1.5 million Z10s.
And that’s going to hit Blackberry hard, he said. “To achieve sustained profitability, we believe the company would need to ship roughly 3-4 times more BB10 devices than we anticipate on a quarterly basis. We remain skeptical that BlackBerry has any reasonable path toward achieving these kinds of shipments.” ®
COMMENTS
Hardly a shock.
Every BB owner/fan I know wants a real keyboard, and that version isn't going to be release until Q3. Unfortunately all they have released so far is an iphone/android-a-like with little app support.
Pity, as the BB does have some nice features, and a bit of competition is always good for progress (27,000 lawyers permitting).
Blame the Marketing Dept
I can get a Nexus 4 for £280. Why would I pay £500 for a Z10?
It's that simple.
Re: ha ha....ha ha ha
I've never understood how analysts stay in business. its seems they never make mistakes, they just "revise their figures"
If my coding was consistently completely wrong I'd get the sack. I wouldn't get the chance to "revise my methods"..... ohhh and now i think i understand what Agile programming is all about and why Agile developers keep getting employed without ever delivering a finished product. :)
Re: Blame the Marketing Dept
Well, you can get a Nexus 4 for £280 at the moment, because a company is willing to give the operating system away for free, and the same company is willing to subsidise its hardware partner to sell them around cost price. That company is, of course, Google - who make virtually all their cash from selling advertising.
If at some point in the future Google have a mobile monopoly, or decide that no other mobile platform is going to steal their search-paid-for-by-advertising business, then things could change rapidly. When you include buying Motorola, Google might have blown around $20 billion on Android (maybe more). Now as well as securing their mobile ad share, they've also got some fantastic data out of that to improve mapping, search and the rest, but that's still a considerable investment that I'm sure they'd like to get repaid. With interest.
Normal companies sell things for a profit. I strongly suspect the internet economy will be a lot more healthy when we pay for the services we use, rather than get them 'free' in exchange for our privacy or paid for entirely by a different service we use. The downside of things being routinely 'free' is that normal companies might not be able to make a profit at them, and so you end up in the situation of relying on corporate charity, or at the mercy of potentially the scariest privacy destruction machine in history. Not that we're close to that yet, but it's a point worth considering. Choice is good.
ha ha....ha ha ha
So a bunch of people who made guesses about how well something might sell have changed those guesses...and there was a range of guesses from 1/3million up towards 4million......
Clearly not a field where people care too much about what they said last week, never mind last month
