Ah yes, that may be it, I am fairly sure they were in the black for a while from their cloud services, but they probably blew that on their push to mobile.
The same article said they were approaching break-even before the mobile push. So maybe, maybe not. It's clear they could do it if they wanted to. It seems to have mostly lost money that Shuttleworth put into it out of his pocket, though.
That's too bad because I like what they've done in terms of usability of Linux outside Unity. I switched to Mint at that point until the distro got subverted way too easily. Then back to Ubuntu with shitty Unity. I can't wait for the new one without it that was just announced since the mobile thing didn't pan out.
