It only took one positive earnings call for the market to regain faith in BlackBerry Ltd. Shares of the Canadian mobile vendor are up more than 11 percent this morning after its third quarter financial results topped the average analyst estimate on the back of a 14 percent sequential sales increase, an improvement that would have been unimaginable a year ago.

Back then, BlackBerry was still trapped in the downward spiral set off by the failure of its previous leadership to address the changing expectations of mobile users, who had come to expect premium features and apps that the homegrown BB10 operating system couldn’t provide. The company’s answer arrived only last month in the form of the Priv, a high-end Android smartphone meant to take on the flagship models from Apple Inc. and Samsung that have been eroding its bottom line. The device turned out to be just what the doctor ordered.

Despite the fact that only less than a month’s worth of Priv sales could be counted toward BlackBerry’s third quarter earnings, the phone nonetheless managed to catapult its average unit selling price from $240 in the previous three-month period to $315. The company sold a total of 700,000 phones that accounted for a third of its revenue, the remainder of which was attributed to service access fees and its booming software business.

Demand for BlackBerry’s employee device management platform more than doubled in the same time frame to $162 million, a hefty 70 percent of which came from subscriptions that generate recurring income set to show up in its next quarterly report as well. Overall, the company made $557 million in the three months ended November 28, significantly higher than the $489 million that the Thomson Reuters projection predicted.

Its bottom line also fared better than the market expected. BlackBerry managed to cut its losses nearly 40 percent year-over-year to $89 million, or 17 cents a share, a figure puts it on track to move out of the red in the foreseeable future if the streamlining continues at the current pace. But the company still has a long way to go before it can recapture a central role in the mobile ecosystem, which is more competitive than ever on both the hardware and software fronts.

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