{"id":62004,"date":"2015-09-25T21:33:30","date_gmt":"2015-09-25T13:33:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=62004"},"modified":"2016-05-31T09:56:51","modified_gmt":"2016-05-31T13:56:51","slug":"blackberry-takes-another-swing-at-better-smartphone-sales-with-an-android-device","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2015\/09\/25\/blackberry-takes-another-swing-at-better-smartphone-sales-with-an-android-device\/","title":{"rendered":"BlackBerry takes another swing at better smartphone sales with an Android device"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"(Shutterstock<\/a>
(Shutterstock photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

WATERLOO, Ont. \u2013 With its hardware sales still flagging BlackBerry\u2019s chief executive John Chen says he\u2019s found a different way to sell his devices.<\/p>\n

For the first time in BlackBerry\u2019s history, the company is going to sell a smarphone that runs on somebody else\u2019s programming rather than its own in-house creation.<\/p>\n

BlackBerry will release the Priv phone later this year, which uses Google\u2019s popular Android operating system.<\/p>\n

The switch was a controversial decision at BlackBerry, Chen said in an interview Friday with reporters at the company’s Waterloo, Ont. headquarters, but it addresses one of the biggest marketing problems BlackBerry faced in recent years: its phones are missing some of the most popular apps and games used by most customers and even businesses.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am now going to eliminate apps as an excuse not to buy our phone,\u201d Chen said. \u201cWe\u2019ll see how it goes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Amid all of the financial troubles of recent years, BlackBerry\u2019s lack of apps has been a thorn in its side. Handfuls of popular apps, from dating service Tinder to Candy Crush, were unavailable for years.<\/p>\n

Chen tried to remove that problem last fall in a partnership with the Amazon Appstore, which offers thousands of apps built for the Android operating system.<\/p>\n

His hope was that Amazon\u2019s store would see its app selection multiply quickly after the launch of the Amazon Fire phone last year.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was dying for Amazon to be successful with their phone,\u201d Chen said.<\/p>\n

But when sales of Amazon\u2019s first device failed to ignite it left Chen in a partnership that wasn\u2019t quite as ideal as he\u2019d hoped \u2013 many apps, like Netflix and Snapchat, were still missing from the mix \u2013 and sales showed that customer weren\u2019t swayed by the proposition.<\/p>\n

BlackBerry hopes the Priv will give it another swing at making a smartphone that competes with the best of them, despite calls from some analysts for the company to shut down its hardware development all together.<\/p>\n

Chen has remained a staunch supporter of BlackBerry phones partly because \u201cmarquee customers\u201d like government agencies and other power players use the device, he said.<\/p>\n

But the CEO plans to make an ultimate decision on whether to pull the plug on BlackBerry hardware during the next fiscal year, after the Priv hits the market.<\/p>\n

\u201cI promise you that I do not like running a business at a loss,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Whether introducing Google\u2019s Android operating system into the mix will improve sales of BlackBerry phones remains to be seen.<\/p>\n

BlackBerry (TSX:BB) missed already low expectations on Friday as its second-quarter financial results that showed it\u2019s still struggling to turn around its business. The company reported a profit of US$51 million for the three months ended Aug. 29, which was an improvement on the year-earlier net loss of US$207 million.<\/p>\n

But it fell short of expectations with an adjusted loss of US$66 million or 13 cents per share \u2013 deeper than the nine cents per share that had been estimated.<\/p>\n

Revenue for the quarter dropped 46 per cent from a year ago to US$490 million, which was well below analyst estimates of US$611 million and the $658 million recorded by BlackBerry in the previous quarter that ended in May.<\/p>\n

BlackBerry phone sales also continued their decline, falling to a dismal 800,000 units around the world, a further slide from the 1.1 million phones sold in the company’s first quarter.<\/p>\n

Chen has focused on reworking BlackBerry\u2019s operations since he joined in November 2013, with tight cost management and cheaper smartphone production being two major objectives.<\/p>\n

Strengthening software licensing and services revenues has been part of Chen\u2019s priorities. He said revenues for that part of its business grew 19 per cent to $74 milllion during the quarter.<\/p>\n

The Waterloo, Ont.-based company has issued widespread layoff notices to its workforce this summer.<\/p>\n

Over the past few weeks, those reductions have centred on deep cuts to its hardware development and manufacturing business as it puts a lower priority on smartphone development, according to two sources who were familiar with the cuts.<\/p>\n

Some of those employees have been told they will lose their jobs in November, one of the sources close to the matter said.<\/p>\n

But the issue of further reductions wasn\u2019t addressed in Friday\u2019s press release or the analyst call.<\/p>\n

The sources both say hundreds of additional jobs have been quietly shed over the summer, affecting software development jobs in Ottawa, manufacturing in Cambridge, Ont., and BlackBerry headquarters in Waterloo.<\/p>\n

Chen told reporters at a media roundtable that it\u2019s \u201chard to determine\u201d exactly how many employees have been laid off because the figures are complicated by recent hirings in certain divisions and the acquisition of other technology companies.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m sure there will come up with a net reduction of some sort, but it’s not going to be that big,\u201d he said, declining to get more specific.<\/p>\n

He noted that when factoring in recent hires BlackBerry has about 3,000 employees across all of its Canadian operations, which is about 500 fewer workers than a year ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WATERLOO, Ont. \u2013 With its hardware sales still flagging BlackBerry\u2019s chief executive John Chen says he\u2019s found a different way …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":52815,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[35],"class_list":["post-62004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-original","mauthors-david-friend","mauthors-the-canadian-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62004\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}