BlackBerry: Back in the black?

The once-iconic phonemaker expects to be profitable again

6/28/24 5:22AM

We’ll be fine

Shares of BlackBerry rose 11% yesterday after the company posted a smaller than expected loss, edging the once world-beating company back towards profitability, with the CEO expecting BlackBerry to be “generating positive cash flow in the fourth quarter”.

The results had nothing to do with shipping phones, however. Since its dramatic fall from grace, the company has pivoted towards selling the software and security features that helped make its phones so popular with security-conscious white-collar workers in the first place.

BlackBerry, along with other 2000s classics like Nokia, TomTom, and pretty much the entire MP3 market, was decimated by the release of the iPhone in 2007. The company’s revenue peaked just shy of $20 billion in 2011, but as the iPhone and other smartphones went mainstream, its sales plummeted. Just five years later, BlackBerry's revenue had dropped to around $2 billion, a period that included a staggering $4.4 billion loss in a single quarter due to a massive inventory writedown.

Realizing that its co-CEO’s famous words — "we'll be fine" — after the iPhone launch were, shall we say, a bit optimistic, the company eventually abandoned selling hardware in 2016. That shift has hardly restored BlackBerry into the global leader that it once was, its most recent annual sales amounted to just 4% of its record, but some version of the company remains alive and kicking. In fact, there’s a good chance you’ve recently used a BlackBerry product indirectly: the company reports that its software is in more than 235 million vehicles around the world.

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OpenAI’s ARR reached over $20 billion in 2025, CFO says

Sam Altman’s $500 billion artificial intelligence behemoth hit a major financial milestone last year, according to a new blog post over the weekend from OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, as the company confirmed it had hit a more than $20 billion annual revenue run rate at the end of 2025.

Elsewhere in the blog post, Friar spent time addressing the company’s shifting goals, referencing plans to “close the distance between where intelligence is advancing and how individuals, companies, and countries actually adopt and use it.” As has become customary in the AI company press release genre, the CFO was also keen to tout the unending growth of the business, writing:

“Both our Weekly Active User (WAU) and Daily Active User (DAU) figures continue to produce all-time highs. This growth is driven by a flywheel across compute, frontier research, products, and monetization.”
“Compute grew 3X year over year or 9.5X from 2023 to 2025: 0.2 GW in 2023, 0.6 GW in 2024, and ~1.9 GW in 2025.”

And, perhaps most importantly for current backers and those keeping an eye on the private company before its rumored mega IPO:

“Revenue followed the same curve growing 3X year over year, or 10X from 2023 to 2025: $2B ARR in 2023, $6B in 2024, and $20B+ in 2025. This is never-before-seen growth at such scale.”

That latest figure has certainly set tongues in the tech world wagging, just as the company announced it would begin rolling out ads to free and ChatGPT Go users. It also puts the chatbot giant a fair way ahead of competitors like Anthropic, the company behind Claude.

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“Both our Weekly Active User (WAU) and Daily Active User (DAU) figures continue to produce all-time highs. This growth is driven by a flywheel across compute, frontier research, products, and monetization.”
“Compute grew 3X year over year or 9.5X from 2023 to 2025: 0.2 GW in 2023, 0.6 GW in 2024, and ~1.9 GW in 2025.”