BlackBerry has stopped making phones, finally surrendering to Apple and Samsung
‘The market has spoken and I’m just listening’: BlackBerry CEO John Chen
It’s official. BlackBerry Ltd, the Canadian company that invented the smartphone and hooked legions of road warriors on devices so addictive they were known as “CrackBerry”, has stopped making handsets.
Finally conceding defeat in a battle lost long ago to Apple and Samsung, BlackBerry is handing over production of the phones to overseas partners and turning its full attention to the more profitable and growing software business. It’s the formalisation of a move in the making since Chief Executive Officer John Chen took over nearly three years ago and outsourced some manufacturing to Foxconn Technology Group. Getting the money-losing smartphone business off BlackBerry’s books will also make it easier for the company to consistently hit profitability.
“This is the completion of their exit,” said Colin Gillis, an analyst at BGC Partners. “Chen is a software CEO historically. He’s getting back to what he knows best: higher margins and recurring revenue.”
BlackBerry said it struck a licensing agreement with an Indonesian company to make and distribute branded devices. More deals are in the works with Chinese and Indian manufacturers. It will still design smartphone applications and an extra-secure version of Alphabet Inc.’s Android operating system.
The new strategy will improve margins and could actually increase the number of BlackBerry-branded phones sold, Chen said, as manufacturers license the name that still holds considerable sway in emerging markets like Indonesia, South Africa and Nigeria.
“This is the way for me to ensure the BlackBerry brand is still on a device,” Chen said.
Although BlackBerry’s latest phone, the DTEK50, was already almost completely outsourced, the move is a big symbolic step for a company that once reached a market value of US$80 billion. Today, it’s worth about US$4.3 billion.
In 2007, the iPhone debuted with its touchscreen interface and app store. People at first said they didn’t want to give up BlackBerry’s keyboard and simplicity. But the lure of apps eventually sent almost all its users to phones running Android or iOS.
“It was inevitable at this point; they didn’t have the unit volumes to sustain the business profitably,” said Matthew Kanterman, an analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence. “This is doubling down on the efforts to focus on software which is really what their strength is.” BlackBerry shipped only 400,000 phones in its fiscal second quarter, half what it sold in the same period last year. Apple sold more than 40 million iPhones last quarter.
BlackBerry said software and services revenue more than doubled in the quarter from a year earlier to US$156 million. Still, software revenue was down from the previous quarter’s US$266 million, which Chen blamed on patent licensing deals that didn’t carry over into the quarter.
BlackBerry’s most important software is its device management suite, which helps companies keep track of their employees’ phones and make sure sensitive communication stays within the business. BlackBerry bought one of its key competitors, Good Technology, for US$425 million last year, but the market is crowded.
“This doesn’t change the fact that there are still a lot of competitive threats,” Kanterman said in a phone interview.