Shipments of BlackBerry smartphones were 7.4 million in the quarter, easily outpacing Wall Street's expectation of about 6.9 million.
The Waterloo, Ontario-based company reported a net loss of $235 million, or 45 cents a share, in its fiscal second quarter. That compared with a profit of $329 million, or 63 cents, in the same period a year earlier.
Excluding one-time restructuring-related items, the loss came in at $142 million, or 27 cents a share, in the quarter just ended.
Revenue rose to $2.9 billion, a gain of 2 percent from the fiscal first quarter, but the latest result was down about 30 percent from the same period a year earlier.
Analysts, on average, had expected RIM to report a loss of 46 cents a share, on revenues of $2.5 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.
"You still have revenue declining 31 per cent on a year-over-year basis but it's certainly not the train wreck that a lot of people feared," said BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis. "They live to fight another day."
RIM also increased its cash to about $2.3 billion from $2.2 billion in the fiscal first quarter.
"In the last two quarters RIM has done a really good job on collecting on receivables," said Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu, but he cautioned that this was not sustainable over the long run and RIM would have to return to a profitable business model for it to thrive once again.
While RIM has warned that it faces another operating loss in its fiscal third quarter, it expects its cash position to remain stable unless it is hit by restructuring charges.
Wu believes that the company can achieve this by continuing to draw down on its receivables, which stood just shy of $2.2 billion as of 1 September.
RIM's chief financial officer said the company had entered into a new secured credit facility of $500 million which expires in September 2013, and in the first half RIM realised some $350 million of the up to $1 billion in cost savings it hopes to achieve in fiscal 2013, which ends on March 2 of next year.
The company, which earlier this year said it would cut about 5,000 jobs to save money, said it has already laid off roughly 2,500 workers.
"It's still bad, but it's a much smaller disaster than expected," said Wu. "These stocks all trade on expectations. Expectations were really low, and they were able to beat that."
