BlackBerry Zero: Smartphone Maker’s US Share Sinks to 0%

BlackBerry’s share of consumer smartphone activations sunk to a number so low it was rounded to 0%.

This on the company’s one-year anniversary of the launch of BlackBerry 10, which was supposed to turn the Waterloo-based smartphone maker’s ship around.

The data comes from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, though a couple of things should be noted: the sample size for the survey was a modest 500 people, and it’s important to note that the study refers to consumers only, not enterprises, and new activations only, not existing devices in the market.

Still, it’s a decidedly negative trend for a company whose stock was just starting to rebound (shares are down more than 5% today), especially considering the US was once BlackBerry’s biggest and most important market. Last quarter, BlackBerry sold an anemic 1.9 million smartphones—and most of those were legacy BlackBerry 7 devices sold in emerging markets. We fully expect “BlackBerry Zero” to become the latest term coined to mark the agonizingly slow collapse of one of Canada’s greatest technology successes.

Meanwhile in the US, Apple’s iOS boasted a 48% marketshare for new activations during the quarter, just ahead of Google’s Android, which accounted for 46%.

“Apple clearly benefitted from launch of the iPhone 5S and 5C just a couple weeks before the quarter started,” said Josh Lowitz, Partner and cofounder of CIRP. “It increased its share considerably over the previous quarter, when it had only 34% of activations.”

Chart: CIRP