MONTREAL: Struggling Canadian smartphone maker BlackBerry fell deeper into the red in the third quarter, reporting a massive $4.4 billion loss Friday, four times higher than in the previous quarter.

In the same statement, the company unveiled a five-year partnership with Foxconn, described as “the world’s largest manufacturer of electronic products and components,” targeted at emerging countries.

Foxconn will manufacture a number of new BlackBerry devices and help manage stocks — an area where BlackBerry has struggled.

The Canadian telecom company attributed the extent of its quarterly loss to a $4.6bn charge for an inventory write-down and other one-time costs.

But the company is also seeing plummeting sales, with third quarter revenues of just $1.2bn, 56 per cent lower than a year earlier.

The company sold just 1.9 million smartphones in the quarter, nearly half the figure from the previous quarter, suggesting the release of the Z10 phone had failed.

In September, the company announced that it was laying off 4,500 staff — or one third of its global workforce — after losing $965m in its second quarter.

The Waterloo, Ontario-based company helped create a culture of mobile users glued to smartphones, but lost its lustre as many moved to iPhones or devices using Google’s Android software.

BlackBerry still has some 70m subscribers worldwide, but most of these are using older handsets, with newer devices on the BlackBerry 10 platform failing to gain traction.—AFP