Blackberry Z10: "Returns outnumbering sales"

The new flagship Blackberry Z10 seems to be in danger of turning into a commercial disaster.

The Wall Street Journal has word from two separate reports that paint a tremendously worrying picture for the handset. The Z10 launched in various territories between January and March of this year.

A report from Detwiler Fenton makes the amazing claim that returns of the handset are currently tracking ahead of its actual sales.

Analyst Jeff Johnston stated: We believe key retail partners have seen a significant increase in Z10 returns to the point where, in several cases, returns are now exceeding sales, a phenomenon we have never seen before.”

Furthermore ITG analyst Joe Fersedi claims that sales of the Z10 started poorly and weakened significantly as the days passed” and are in line-to marginally ahead of anemic sales of older Blackberry models”.

He added that while the Z10 initially accounted for four per cent and seven per cent of the sales share at US carriers Verizon and AT&T respectively, this has since fallen to one per cent and two per cent.

Blackberry, which claims to have sold 1m Z10’s prior to its US launch last month, has denied the reports: BlackBerry wishes to respond to media coverage today regarding speculation that there have been abnormally high levels of returns of BlackBerry Z10 devices.

This is absolutely false. Our data shows that return rates for BlackBerry Z10 devices both in the US and on a global basis are in line with or better than our expectations and are consistent with return rates for other premium smartphones in the market today.”