A few months ago, CEO John Chen, had declared that he would seriously be taking a call about its company’s smart phone business in the month of September. Following to which BlackBerry Ltd. declared a 31.8 % fall in its second-quarter revenue and finally announced the end of all its internal hardware development. This means that the company plans to stop making its own smart phones. They will instead outsource the job.
BlackBerry, from a long time, has been striving to re-establish itself in the market. They’ve been attempting to rise since the collapse of its BB7-based flagship devices. It has been a long & bumpy ride for BlackBerry. The company’s decision to move to Android as an alternative OS for its smart phones was the best move since a decade. But this move came out too late. This came with loads of flaws in both software & hardware. Yet everything was quite stable until its latest reveal of a budget smart phone -DTEK50, which turned out to be somewhat a lazy attempt and is probably a rebranded Alcatel phone.
“Blackberry is not getting out of the devices business. We are simply adjusting the model for how BlackBerry devices are brought to market,” said the company in a statement.
The Ontario-based company summarized a net loss of $372 million, on revenue of $334 million. It was only a year ago that the company reported a profit of $51 million on the revenue of $490 million.
The company has since made one fruitless attempt at Android hardware. This was in the form of underpowered, overpriced, and prone-to-overheating BlackBerry Priv. The company has also tried to build itself as a software service provider with Messenger for Android and BlackBerry Hub. But those services are not able to prove competitive in the existing and overcrowded app space.
For a company that has been striving so hard to reacquire its foundation comes as no surprise with its departure. “This is an entirely sensible decision and probably an overdue one. Software revenue and the margin profile associated with that is where the focus should have been, and now can be,” said IDC technology analyst John Jackson.
