(Bloomberg) -- BlackBerry Ltd.’s Chief Executive Officer John Chen is making good on his promise to stabilize the company he turned from a failing smartphone maker into a mid-range cloud software provider.

Shares in the company jumped in early trading as it beat analyst estimates for revenue growth for the fourth quarter in a row. Revenue was $217 million, compared with the average of analysts’ estimates of $211 million, while profit, excluding some items, was 3 cents, far ahead of the average estimate of less than 1 cent, according to a statement from the Waterloo, Ontario-based company Friday. About 86 percent of software revenue was recurring, a key measure analysts use to judge whether growth is based on core software sales or simply one-time licensing deals.

Under Chen, BlackBerry acquired a collection of small software companies to beef up its offerings, and pushed more aggressively into the automotive tech fields. The company has also been pursuing patent lawsuits against tech giants like Facebook, which is says built popular chat features based off of BlackBerry ideas.

To contact the reporter on this story: Gerrit De Vynck in New York at gdevynck@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56@bloomberg.net, Jacqueline Thorpe

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