[40blind40]

I found this poster thoughts real intriguing, I have often thought the real sales figures have been lower because of past channel stuffing.
Blackberry reported that in Q4 they reduced there channel inventory by another 30%. This poster goes in to a little more detail as he responds to
inventory charges from Q4, if his analysis is correct things while still bleak could point to stronger sales then what we are led to believe,
while no expert myself I found OP comments interesting, what you'all think?

BlackBerry ( T.BB ) stock message board and forum - Bullboard Discussion - Stockhouse Community

The World According to Yersh: Skewed Sales/Revenue Figures

Q4. BB actually sold through 3.4 million phones. This of course will not be mentioned in all the charts we'll see over the next 3 months describing the depths to which the company has fallen. Instead, the number to be thrown up at us over and over again will be the official number of booked sales: 1.3 million. All this because, at some point between Jan. 2012 and June 2013, BlackBerry filled channels with so many millions of BB7s and then BB10s and booked those shipped phones as sales. Instead of revising old financial statements, it was far easier for BlackBerry to take a public relations hit in the past few quarters. So, money booked from earlier shipments has simply been moved into a different category in the financial statements, and that shift has no bearing on the bottom line.

The fact remains that BlackBerry's new accounting method has once again shortchanged the revenue figures to the tune of 2.1 million handsets. What was the average selling price for these phones?
Let's say $250, as most of them were Bolds or one of the BB10s, where the most popular -- the Q10 -- is still commanding north of $399 unlocked.

2.1 million X $250 = $525 million.
Let's take this down a notch, just to be on the safe side, and say the ASP was a mere $200 instead.
That still leaves us with $420 million.

So, for starters, BlackBerry's true income was actually $976m plus $420m = $1.396 billion.

BUT WAIT -- there's more! BlackBerry sold an additional 745,000 phones in Q4. This fact is hidden in plain sight in their "pre-tax inventory recovery of $149 million." In short, BB had written these phones off as unsellable, but it turned out that demand for them was stronger than anticipated, and so BB (if the ASP was $200) sold 745K of them. Again, it couldn't book this money as Q4 revenue per se, because it had already taken a writedown on this inventory, and so it was re-booked as separate one-time charge.

One flaw in that little skein of logic (??) is that BB might have sold off this inventory at a much lower price than $200. I'm thinking, specifically, that this line in the financials is referring to the massive production run of Z10s, which BB is still trying to unload, and that a lot of them were sold for, say $100. IF $100 was the ASP for this "inventory recovery," that would actually be even better news, in a way. It would mean that another 1,490,000 phones made their way into consumers' hands.

Revised, "real" Revenue from straightforward accounting of hardware, software, & services:
$976 + $420 + $149 = $1.425 billion.

Revised, "real" sales figures for devices:
3.4m + 745K (or 1.49m) = 4.145 million (or 4.89 million).

Read more at BlackBerry ( T.BB ) stock message board and forum - Bullboard Discussion - Stockhouse Community

[JBhar]

Hmmmm very interesting! Thanks for sharing! Even if it was 200 million dollars off of that figure, I personally, think that would still be great

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[wincyUt]

One would have to review the financial statements, along with the footnotes and disclosures before being able to ascertain whether the above analysis makes sense. What is for sure is that BlackBerry's financial reporting is done according GAAP and FASB guidelines.
In nutshell, the above analysis is not really clear cut to me. Maybe someone can shed more light.

[jmerheb]

His assumption on device sales for inventory recovery is wrong. The writedown was on Z10s e.g. if the cost of manufacturing and delivering a Z10 was 250$ but BB management believed they could not recover more than 150$ per device, then they would writedown the inventory to the lower amount (market price) and get a hit of 100$ per device in inventory, this has nothing to do with sales but asset value. Since Blackberry took a charge of 1 Bn$ its likely they wrote down the devices by 100$ and had 10 Mn units in stock (or possibly 150$ for 6Mn) . Since then they have been selling these devices and recording revenue on the selling price, the recovery only indicates that they have been able to sell Z10s at a price higher than they expected e.g. 200$. It is highly unlikely that Z10s in inventory were written off to 0, and even if they were the sales figure would still include these devices in the count.

[nexus2905]

Where's Chris when you need him?

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