Catastrophic losses at BlackBerry: the final meltdown?

The company has issued a trading update in which it says it expects to post a close-to $1 billion loss for its second financial quarter. More jobs are to be stripped out and the BlackBerry range will be cut down to four smartphones from the current six (see - The Lord High Executioner back to take another swing at BlackBerry workers).

Of course the underlying problem is appalling sales figures - not just for its long-awaited Blackberry 10 devices which won't all be recognised in the second quarter (they have to be sold through the channel first), but for the old Blackberry 7 stock which, hardly surprisingly, isn't selling that well. The $1 billion expected loss will come largely as a result of a stock write-down

As things stand BlackBerry is expecting revenues of around $1.6 billion, half of which will be service revenue - it still has $2.6 billion in cash and equivalents.

President and CEO, Thorsten Heins, says Blackberry plans to refocus on "an end-to-end solution for hardware, software and services for enterprises and the productive, professional end user."

As if to prove that Blackberry management has absolutely no grip on anything, it's emerged that executives spent millions on a company jet in the months before announcing their billion dollar loss. The idea was to save a bit of money by replacing two of the company's older executive jets - with one jet.

The anger isn't (just) because a corporation in layoff mode was spending time and money choosing jets for its executives, but because reality hadn't intruded. Blackberry execs still thought they warranted private jets!

All company jets are now to be sold.