BlackBerry claimed “historical highs in total software and services revenue” in its fiscal Q2, as it also trumpeted its first BlackBerry Secure licensing deal.

CEO John Chen (pictured) said the earnings reflects BlackBerry’s “complete transformation to a software company”.

“More importantly, we made significant progress on our key growth initiatives. Our enterprise billings grew 19 per cent year-over-year driven by our Unified Endpoint Management platform. We secured important design wins in our automotive business, and we expanded our sales channels for our Radar IoT solution,” he continued.

With regard to its licensing business, BlackBerry offers a “growing pipeline of opportunities” with its BlackBerry Secure software and its intellectual property (IP) portfolio, the CEO said.

For the period to 31 August 2017, the company reported a net income of $19 million compared with a prior-year loss of $372 million, on revenue of $238 million, down from $334 million.

Around 79 per cent of software and services revenue (excluding IP licensing and professional services) was recurring. It had around 3,300 enterprise customer orders in the quarter.

BlackBerry Secure deal
The company also announced its first BlackBerry Secure licensing deal, with Yangzhou New Telecom Science and Technology (NTD), a Chinese electronics company which develops and manufactures smartphones and IoT devices.

Terms of the deal mean NTD can develop devices using BlackBerry’s security software, which can then be marketed as “BlackBerry Secure”. The first product will be an all-touch smartphone incorporating secure enterprise collaboration technology for Equiis Technologies of Switzerland, which will ship early 2018.

“Customers and markets for the smartphone will be announced at a later date”, BlackBerry said.

BlackBerry already agreed deals with BB Merah Putih, Optiemus Infracom and TCL, which enable the companies to bring BlackBerry-branded devices to market.

Eugene Li, CEO of NTD, said: “With hacks and other malicious threats directed towards all connected devices on the rise, we’re proud to be able to offer our customers BlackBerry Secure smartphones. Providing this level of security will give our customers peace of mind while communicating for business or just in their everyday lives.”