Earlier this month,
BlackBerry (
BBRY) confirmed that
an undisclosed partner agreed to purchase one million new
BlackBerry 10 smartphones.
According to AllThingsD, the purchase, which was the single largest in BlackBerry’s history, came from an electronics distributor known as Brightstar. Research firm Detwiler Fenton notes that the company handles most of
Verizon’s (
VZ) big-box retail distribution, and the partnership gives the carrier less risk if BlackBerry 10 fails to appeal to consumers because it can offload unsold inventory onto the third-party distributor. Verizon usually distributes devices it believes will be popular among consumers by itself, rather than relying on a third-party. This is not the case for BlackBerry 10, though.
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