To bring you up to speed, Blackberry’s largest shareholder is Fairfax Financial Holdings. Fairfax had plans to takeover Blackberry but abandoned this plan and is now financing the company for a total of 1 Billion Dollars. Along with the financing, Thorsten Heins who was the CEO at the time is asked to step down being succeeded by John Chen, Blackberry’s new interim CEO and Fairfax’s personal choice. Along with new management comes the notion of a new vision or new direction, as talked about in the article I read. In my eyes the constant revamping of Blackberry’s “vision” is just a cover for a company that lacks what it takes to compete in the current smartphone industry. Failing to release its Blackberry 10 platform this year, and the release of its proprietary software, BBM, to other smartphones has triggered red flags for investors like myself; couple this with poor sales for its product line this year and their inability to attract emerging markets and Blackberry is looking worse than ever. I do however recognize that Blackberry does indeed have brand value as it is considered the phone of business for many. That being said, I’ve also read that Blackberry’s most loyal customers, the U.S. Department of Defence may ditch the Canadian smartphone for something “Designed by Apple in California”.
The article used in this post can be found at:
Photo can be found at:
http://timebusinessblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/rtx13x0q.jpg?w=480&h=320&crop=1
