BlackBerry said that compared with the previous year's revenue drop of $1.19 billion, this year's revenue fell to $793 million. This is lower than the analysts' expected drop of $931.5 million.
From having a negative cash flow of $35 million during the year's second quarter, BlackBerry returned to a positive cash flow of $43 million in the third quarter. The company hopes to gain break-even cash flow in February 2015, the end of the fiscal year.
Credit was given to John Chen, BlackBerry's chief executive officer, for doing a good job in better handling of expenses as a way to boost the cash pile of the company.
"The fact that he overachieved by turning cash flow positive this quarter, that's a great milestone," said tech analyst Colin Gillis at BGC Partners in New York. "It gets easier from here."
During the quarter which ended on Nov. 29, BlackBerry reported a net loss amounting to $148 million or an equivalent of 28 cents a share. Last year, the net loss was calculated to have reached $4.4 billion or $8.37 per share.
BlackBerry also announced the company's acquisition of Secusmart GmbH. The financial details of the deal were not revealed.
Secusmart is known to have built the technology protecting the devices held by the government officials in Canada and also in Germany. This includes the BlackBerry mobile that is used by German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
It was only last month that the German government approved the acquisition venture. It was considered a sensitive takeover case in Germany since the announcement of the deal occurred right after some revelations involving the U.S. intelligence agencies. According to the report, these agencies had listened in on phone conversations which were made by Merkel using a nonencrypted phone.
Apart from Merkel, other German government officers now own BlackBerry mobile devices which are built with Secusmart encryption.
"With the benefit of Secusmart's talented team at BlackBerry, we look forward to building on our leadership position in mobile security at a time when cybersecurity breaches and data theft pose ever-growing costs and threats to governments, companies and consumers," said Chen.
BlackBerry is the sole mobile device management (MDM) company that has achieved the level of certification known as "Full Operational Capability" that enabled BlackBerry devices to operate on U.S. Department of Defense Networks. Additionally, the BlackBerry 10 mobile phones were the first NATO-approved devices for classified communications, up to the "Restricted" level. BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 has security end-to-end and uses AES 256-bit, the highest encryption level of the standard, for data at rest and data in transit.
