BlackBerry reported a profitable first fiscal quarter, boosted by a $940 million award following arbitration with Qualcomm, although its sales during the period failed to impress.

The company reported a profit of $671 million for the quarter to 31 May, compared with a prior-year loss of $670 million, on revenue of $235 million, down from $400 million. Total software and service revenue was $160 million.

It touted “over 3,000 enterprise customer orders” in the quarter, compared with 3,500 in the prior sequential quarter.

Total cash and short-term investments increased by $855 million to around $2.6 billion: “We are better positioned to invest in our strategic areas of focus to drive long-term sustainable growth, while returning capital through share repurchases to further enhance shareholder value,” John Chen, CEO, said.

BlackBerry announced a plan to buy-back up to 6.4 per cent of its outstanding public shares.

“In Q1, we made great progress strengthening our strategic position in emerging growth markets, most notably in cybersecurity and the Enterprise of Things,” the executive said.

“We secured key design wins in high growth segments of automotive technology, including advanced driver assist, digital instrument cluster and our hypervisor solution. Our ecosystem is growing with Qualcomm and Nvidia adopting BlackBerry technology for their automotive platforms,” he continued.

The period also saw some progress on BlackBerry’s mobile device licensing activities. TCL began shipments of the Keyone smartphone, with BB Merah Putih also making its BlackBerry Aurora available.