Analyst cuts estimate of BlackBerry Z10 quarterly shipments from 1.75 million units to 300,000

Now that the dust has settled, Canaccord Genuity analyst T. Michael Walkley has cut his estimate of the number of BlackBerry Z10 units  that he forecasts will be shipped in the first quarter of the year. The analyst expects just 300,000 units of the all-touch BlackBerry Z10 to ship during the period, down from his initial call for 1.75 million units to be shipped in Q1. Because the phone wasn't introduced until the end of January, the actual amount of time that the phone was available during the period was only about 1 month. While there were reports of widespread sellouts in the U.K. after the launch of the model, some critics said that supplies of the phone were kept low on purpose to ensure a sellout and that some stores only had 15 BlackBerry Z10s to sell.

While the BlackBerry Z10 has launched in Canada and the U.K., the device won't reach U.S. consumers until the middle to end of next month. T-Mobile says the phone is more stable than anticipated and might be able to whack two weeks off of a possible launch date, to the middle of March. But Walkley says that the U.S. launch of the device isn't that important to his estimate as he does not see U.S. carriers building a large inventory stockpile of the phone. "We anticipate carriers will not build large inventory levels," Walkley told clients in a research report.

Another analyst, Brian Blair, shared Walkley's pessimism about U.S. carrier reaction to the new BlackBerry device. "We are getting indications that U.S. carriers are not optimistic about Z10 sell-through, but are instead more hopeful about the keyboard-based Q10," said Blair. The BlackBerry Q10 is the QWERTY equipped model of the new BlackBerry 10 line, and is expected to be available to carriers 6 to 8 weeks after they launch the BlackBerry Z10.

Canaccord Genuity's Walkley says that BlackBerry faces too much competition from iOS and Android models, including a possible new version of the Apple iPhone in the first half of this year, and from the Samsung Galaxy S IV, which could reach the U.S. as soon as May.

source: Investors.com via Slashgear