BlackBerry Z10 Prices Drop to $49 Amid Weak Sales

　　Four months after launching BlackBerry Ltd.’s flagship Z10 smartphone, U.S. carriers and retailers are already discounting the device by as much as 75%.
　　AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless, stung by slower sales of the all-touch-screen phone, have cut the price in half to $99 from $199 with a two-year contract. Best Buy Co. and Amazon.com Inc. are now offering the phone under contract for $49. Without the contract, the Z10 sells for about $700.
　　The price cuts put the Z10 at a steep discount to competing high-end phones from Samsung Electronics Co. and Apple Inc. that sell for $199 with a contract.
　　Discounting is common in smartphone marketing. Samsung recently discounted its Galaxy S3 ahead of the launch of a newer version of the phone. But such an early move by carriers and retailers to discount the Z10, just months after its late-March launch, suggest the phone isn’t selling well.
　　A BlackBerry spokesman said in a statement that “now is the right time to adjust the price” of the Z10 as the company introduces newer models.
　　“It’s part of life cycle management to tier the pricing for current devices to make room for the next ones,” he wrote in an email. “This is just one element of our marketing strategy that will ensure we remain aggressive in a very competitive market landscape.”
　　Last year, U.S. carriers cut in half the price of the Lumia 900, the flagship brand of another struggling phone maker, Nokia Corp., only about three months after launch.
　　BlackBerry is banking on a turnaround on sales of its new line of phones, including the Z10 and the keyboard-equipped Q10, which went on sale in the U.S. in June. In its most recent earnings report last month, new BlackBerry phone sales came in well under most analysts’ estimates, though the company didn’t break out sales of the models.
　　Investors hammered BlackBerry shares after the earnings results came in, and pressure is mounting on chief executive Thorsten Heins to prove that his promises of a turnaround are bearing fruit.
　　On Friday, BlackBerry’s shares traded down about 1% to $9.24. The shares are down about 36% since the earnings report.
　　At the company’s annual shareholders meeting earlier this week, Mr. Heins was confronted by a shareholder who said the U.S. launch of the Z10 had been a “disaster.”
　　Mr. Heins admitted that the U.S. market is “ferocious” and that the company is having trouble there, but denied the launch was a disaster.
　　The Z10 discounting is reminiscent of another weak BlackBerry product launch: the company’s PlayBook tablet. A few months after the PlayBook was launched in 2011, when the company reported weak sales of the tablet, , when the company reported weak sales of the tablet,retailers slashed prices.
　　Later that year, BlackBerry wrote down nearly $500 million in unsold PlayBook inventory. Last month, Mr. Heins announced that the company would not be updating the PlayBook to its new BlackBerry 10 operating system, effectively pulling support for the device.
　　Corrections & Amplifications
　　A previous version of this article implied that AT&T Inc. is selling a new BlackBerry Z10 phone for $49. That is for a refurbished version. The carrier is offering a new Z10 for $99.