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BlackBerry Ltd. executives said the company has made good progress in its efforts to cut costs as it reported a slimmer loss in its latest quarter than the prior year.

“This was a good quarter for BlackBerry,” said CEO John Giamatteo on a call with analysts.

“The hard work that the team has done with managing costs is really paying off, with operating expenses now significantly lower than prior year.”

BlackBerry reported a net loss of US$19 million in its second quarter, compared with a US$42-million net loss a year earlier.

The Waterloo, Ont.-headquartered company says revenue for the quarter ended Aug. 31 was US$145 million, up from US$132 million during the same quarter last year.

The company says revenue for both its cybersecurity and Internet of Things divisions grew by double digits year over year. Revenue for the cybersecurity division was US$87 million, while the Internet of Things division brought in US$55 million.

BlackBerry has been working on splitting the two divisions. It announced the planned split last October, saying it intended to pursue a subsidiary public offering for the Internet of Things business after evaluating a range of strategic alternatives for the company.

The company made “tremendous progress” on the split during the quarter, said Giamatteo, with much of the “low-hanging fruit” out of the way.However, he said the company is trying to strike the right balance as it tackles some of the more complicated parts of the split.

“Some of these things are naturally a little bit more intertwined,” he said.

This past quarter, BlackBerry said its adjusted operating expenses came in at US$99 million, down from US$114 million a year earlier.

In February this year, BlackBerry announced it was cutting 200 jobs and exiting six of its 36 global office locations.

“Cost remains a key focus going into the second half, and during September, we announced a number of further back-office headcount reductions and facilities closures as we continued to streamline operations,” said Tim Foote, the company’s new chief financial officer, on the call.

“The new management team at BlackBerry has managed to thread the needle of significantly reducing costs, while at the same time managing to stabilize the top line and even drive growth,” Foote said.

Foote’s appointment was announced near the end of July, succeeding Steve Rai. He was most recently the CFO for BlackBerry’s cybersecurity division.

The company raised the bottom end of its full-year guidance for its Internet of Things division.

Diluted loss per share came in at three cents US, compared with seven cents US last year.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 26, 2024.

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Note to readers: This is a corrected story. A previous version has the incorrect revenue number for BlackBerry’s second quarter in the previous year.

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BANFF, ALTA. – Some Canadian CEOs say the hundreds of billions of dollars the United States is offering in subsidies for the energy transition is causing a worrisome brain drain of some of this country’s top talent.

Ken Seitz, the CEO of Saskatoon-based Nutrien Inc., was one of the Canadian executives who expressed the concern Thursday at the Global Business Forum, a conference of business, policy and academic leaders held annually in Banff, Alta.

“You can just see the brainpower heading south,” Seitz said, adding the tax credits and subsidies offered through President Joe Biden’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act are drawing investment dollars south of the border when it comes to things like renewable energy and carbon capture and storage.

“You can see the ecosystem that’s evolving (in the U.S.) around some of these clean technologies, and the very real incentives that are there for all of that to happen.”

Seitz’s concerns were echoed by Darlene Gates, CEO of Canadian oilsands company MEG Energy Corp., who also spoke in Banff on Thursday.

Gates said Canada’s existing combination of regulation and incentives for decarbonization is not spurring the same amount of investment in this country as the Inflation Reduction Act has south of the border.

The Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, was signed into law in 2022 and offers about US$375 billion in new and extended tax credits for everything from renewable electricity generation to hydrogen production to sustainable jet fuel usage to help the U.S. clean energy industry get off the ground.

Since its inception, the IRA has been held up as the gold standard in the global race for clean energy investment, with many Canadian companies saying the U.S. incentives are so attractive that it’s impossible to compete.

“It’s not that we need to have the same tools, but the outcome needs to be the same as what the IRA is driving. And we’re not getting to the same outcome in Canada as the IRA is producing,” she said.

“If we’re not careful, those investments go to the U.S. Our people, our talent, goes to the U.S. and we become uncompetitive.”

Nutrien, which is the world’s largest fertilizer producer, already employs carbon capture and storage technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from its nitrogen production process in Louisiana. Seitz said the company is “enjoying the benefits” of the tax credit the U.S. offers for captured carbon.

For Gates’ part, MEG is part of the Pathways Alliance, a consortium of Canadian oilsands companies that has proposed what would be one of the world’s largest carbon capture and storage networks, but that has not yet made a final decision to go ahead with the project.

Pathways continues to state that it is working with federal and provincial governments to determine a level of fiscal and regulatory support that will enable it to give its project a green light.

While Canada has its own federal tax credit for companies seeking to build carbon capture and storage facilities, it does not provide financial incentives for the actual capturing of carbon like the U.S. does. Instead, Canada has an industrial carbon pricing system that is meant to discourage high levels of emissions.

A report from TD Economics last year said the two country’s systems, while different, amount to a similar level of support for the clean energy transition. But Canadian business leaders have complained that the U.S.’s “carrot” approach makes that country more attractive than Canada’s “stick” approach.

But even as the IRA continues to draw investment south of the border, its future is not certain. A recent report from J.P. Morgan Investment Bank estimated that the IRA combined with the U.S. incentives to produce semiconductors in that country have stimulated close to US$500 billion in announced private investments.

But the report said a Donald Trump victory in the U.S. presidential vote in November could pose a risk to IRA spending.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 26, 2024.

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OTTAWA – Accusations of homophobia and partisan jabs took centre stage in the House of Commons on Thursday as MPs debated another Conservative motion aimed at toppling the government, after their first attempt failed.

The fall sitting of Parliament has been off to a heated start and hostilities continued to run high Thursday, forcing House Speaker Greg Fergus to play referee in question period and beyond.

Conservative MP Garnett Genuis defended himself against accusations of homophobia over a comment he made on Wednesday about the prime minister engaging in a bathtub with other leaders.

The comment, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s response, derailed question period for a time after Trudeau accused the Tories of bullying and casual homophobia, and said he would “call them out on their crap.”

On Thursday, NDP MP Heather McPherson called on the Speaker to uphold decorum in the House of Commons, calling Genuis’s remark homophobic and disgusting.

“It had nothing to do with sex, I wasn’t thinking about sex at all,” Genuis said, as members around him shouted.

The tensions in Parliament come as the Conservatives make back-to-back bids to try and bring down the minority government.

The majority of MPs voted on Wednesday against the first non-confidence motion that was put forward by the Conservative leader.

If that motion had passed, it would have defeated the government and very likely triggered an immediate election campaign.

The Conservatives are now accusing the NDP and Bloc Québécois of propping up a government they have repeatedly criticized.

However, the NDP and Bloc are rejecting the Conservatives’ framing of events, saying that the non-confidence vote essentially asks them to support Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre over Trudeau.

The second non-confidence motion brought forward by Poilievre on Thursday states that the House of Commons has lost confidence in the Liberal government and “offers Canadians the option to axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime.”

That’s the list of slogans the Tories have been using for months.

NDP MP Charlie Angus said Thursday the confidence vote was about “whether the leader of the Opposition should be trusted.”

The series of confidence votes comes after the NDP ended the supply-and-confidence deal that had kept the government stable since early 2022.

The Bloc Québécois has given the Liberals until Oct. 29 to pass two private member’s bills related to supply management and old age security if they want to avoid an election before Christmas.

MPs will vote on the latest Tory motion on Oct. 1 and on another confidence motion related to the Liberals’ capital gains tax changes on Oct. 2.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 26, 2024.

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