BlackBerry Lost Nearly $1B During Fiscal Q2 2014, Will Cut 4,500 Jobs

From DailyTech: The Wall Street Journal reported this week that BlackBerry was on the verge of slashing 40 percent of its workforce. Today, that news has come to fruition as the company announced that it would lay off 4,500 employees. This will leave BlackBerry with 7,000 employees worldwide.

In addition, the Canadian-based company announced some rather disastrous financials as well. We have been reported for quite some time that sales of BB10-based devices (Z10, Q10) have flopped since their introduction earlier this year. But now we know the full extent of the damage -- BlackBerry is taking a non-cash, pre-tax charge of $930 to $960 million primarily due to unsold Z10 smartphones. That figure ranks right up there with Microsoft's nearly $1B charge for its Surface tablets.

When the dust settles on fiscal Q2 2014, BlackBerry is expecting a GAAP net operating loss of $950 to $995 million.

"We are implementing the difficult, but necessary operational changes announced today to address our position in a maturing and more competitive industry, and to drive the company toward profitability," said BlackBerry President and CEO Thorsten Heins. Going forward, we plan to refocus our offering on our end-to-end solution of hardware, software and services for enterprises and the productive, professional end user. This puts us squarely on target with the customers that helped build BlackBerry into the leading brand today for enterprise security, manageability and reliability."

BlackBerry will also transition away from producing consumer-centric smartphones and will instead focus on what it calls "enterprise and prosumer-centric" devices. Its smartphone device-count will drop from six to four, with two high-end and two entry-level smartphones.

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