A few minutes ago BlackBerry issued its press release with financial results for Q4. As usual it’s a good news / bad news situation, and the conference call is in less than half an hour. I’ll come back afterwards with a more detailed review.

Until then here are a few things I noticed.

Revenue was weaker than analysts expected. Consensus estimates were $1.11 billion but the company generated only $976 million. That’s a 12% miss, suggesting revenue is falling faster than the Street thought.

Operating expenses were cut very significantly in the quarter, and this is good news. Last quarter R&D and SG&A were a combined total of $865 million. This quarter it dropped all the way to $601 million.

They are still burning lots of cash. Cash flow used in operations in the fourth quarter was approximately $553 million. Their cash balance is $2.7 billion, down from $3.2 billion last quarter.

They didn’t sell a lot of BB10 hardware Sell through of hardware was 3.4 million devices, of which 2.3 million were running the legacy BlackBerry 7 OS. Everyone can do the math here. They need to do something to accelerate BlackBerry 10 sales if they want to stay in the hardware business at all.

Guidance is for cash break even by the end of the current fiscal year. They are reporting Q4 F2014, but they are in the middle of Q1 F2015, and they are targeting cashflow break even by the end of this year (year ends February, remember). That’s all they had to say about guidance, which suggests revenue has further to drop.

Looking forward to the call …

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