11:00 AM – We already knew this was happening. BlackBerry is exiting the high-end consumer smartphone market. The company has not had any major success with its high-end line of smartphones, such as the Z10. There are several reasons as to why BlackBerry failed, and it cost the company millions. While it’s not too late, the company has realized the mistake.
In today’s earnings call, BlackBerry CEO John Chen said that the company will partner up with Foxconn for designing and manufacturing its future BlackBerry headsets. The only handsets BlackBerry would keep designing would be those will be for a limited number of high-end enterprise users. This will lessen the profit loss and perhaps improve the company’s financial situation.
CEO Chen also said that the company may return to designing high-end devices again in the future, but that will not be for a while. For now, the company needs to cut its losses and be on the road for improvement. BlackBerry is now concentrating its resources towards enterprise software development and services strategy. The financial situation at BlackBerry is currently unstable, so they need to get that straightened out first before moving into anything new.
The company will now be focusing more in emerging markets where its own BBM service is quite popular. It will design future headsets to specifically appeal to the low-cost market customers. The company has failed to appeal in the high-end market, now it turns to the emerging market, which makes sense.
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