Like Satya Nadella at Microsoft, BlackBerry’s John Chen seems strangely reluctant to cut the ties with smartphones. However, Chen is slowly turning the company into a software vendor, focused on its enterprise messaging and device management platforms. His latest move may be to reduce the number of handsets that BlackBerry launches from four to just one per year.
While this might seem hardly worth the effort, Chen compared the tactic to Apple’s once-a-year cycle. Of course, a company only needs one launch annually if it can shift up to 75m units in a quarter, as opposed to BlackBerry’s current numbers which barely top onem (across several models).
The CEO told Fox Business: “We are reducing jobs, but it’s not so much as reducing, we are shifting it. Traditionally, we make four phones a year. We are not going to do that any more. We are going to at least cut it down to a lot less number, maybe two, maybe one.”
In its most recent quarter, BlackBerry said it had sold 1.1m devices, down from the later quarters of 2014 and about the same number as when Chen took the helm in 2013. Chen is taking the gamble that enterprise customers will value BlackBerry software across many platforms, not just the way it was integrated with the hardware – another way in which he is taking a very different approach to Apple’s. He said BlackBerry had “kind of wandered away” from enterprise and security markets, which were “in its DNA”, but promised, “now we are back in full force”.
He said the firm is spending $100m on acquisitions and developments to fill gaps in its software and security portfolio, while diverting resources away from devices. The latest is AtHoc, an enabler of secure crisis communications, which follows recent purchases of Movirtu, Secusmart and WatchDox.
But like Microsoft, it is clinging to offering a few smartphones, particularly for the enterprise heartland. In future, these may run Android, and are likely to target specific niches such as very secure phones, or users wanting retro keyboard designs like the BlackBerry Classic.
In several comments around the results announcement, Chen called on investors and customers to be patient as he worked his magic. “I would like to have some more time to put the value back together. And if we put the value back together, the shareholders, if they are patient, I hope they will be rewarded many times over,” he said. In another interview, he added: “There is still a lot of work to do, I’d love for everything to move faster, but I caution people to be a bit patient because we can’t rebound in a very short period of time, no company can.”