Canada’s Export Development Corporation (EDC), a crown corporation, is providing Telefonica with a 200 million euro loan to buy BlackBerry products. That works out to about $255 million US dollars, and if we assume it’s for BlackBerry 10 products, it suggests Telefonica is buying somewhere between 500,000 and 700,000 devices depending on the price assumptions you make. Remember that BlackBerry will be releasing more models with different price points.

So the order isn’t going to be earth shattering, but it’s nice to see things progressing on the rollout of BB10. Telefonica is a Spanish operator, but they’re also pretty big in Latin America.

EDC gets involved in a lot of transactions like this. I’m not an expert in EDC financings by any means, but I have seen plenty of them in my time covering Canadian stocks. When the EDC gets involved it just greases the wheels a bit, making it easier for BlackBerry to do business with with the buyer, Telefonica.