The Phoenix Rises out of the Ashes
How about a round of applause for the Canadian tech company, BlackBerry. I personally thought that the company was done for since its pathetic performance last year. But it seems like CEO Chen is looking to raise the phoenix from the ashes by tapping into another side of the market—software licensing business.
The company has lost its place in the hardware and is therefore exiting and getting into the software, instead. We have seen the company take this step by signing licensing deals that will have its hardware in mobile phones created by its partners and also, open a research center for self-driving cars which are also known as autonomous cars.
A new BlackBerry tablet might even be in the works!
CEO Chen also looks to push his company to the max by having its engineers create software for wearable devices such as watches, etc., appliances and medical devices.
“We (would) actually like to have our software technology and secure technology embedded into everything”. The well-known physical, BlackBerry keyboard will be featured on the phone by TCL Communication Technology Holdings Ltd. which will been sold in Canada and some other countries. BlackBerry’s 4th quarter was US$47M—a 9 cents per share which is a great move-up from the $238M loss it had at the same time last year.
Revenue for the quarter fell 38% to $286M.
It did better than the estimate of a loss of 13 cents per share and revenue of $289M. This is according to the Thomson Reuters data.
“I wish every quarter will be that easy. I do believe, however, we’re going to have more good quarters in the future than in the past few years.”
CEO Chen’s expectations for his company is growth in the software and services business by 13% to 15%.
For the full year ended Feb. 28, BlackBerry had a $1.21 billion loss under general accounting rules and just $1.31 billion of revenue, which was down nearly 40 per cent from fiscal 2015-16.
