On September 24 2014, Blackberry Passport was sold out within 6 hours of its release and within 10 hours on Amazon’s. Apparently, 200,000 orders are still on pending.

Not long ago, Blackberry limited was still a dead company. Its revenue was on decline and had never climbed back up since Apple and Samsung have released their smartphones. John Chen, the new CEO, stepped up just in time to flip the company around. Blackberry Passport is indeed his trump card.

With the former CEO, Blackberry had no clear generic strategy. It tried to capture a broad range of customers but possessed neither cost leadership nor product differentiation. As for the Passport, Blackberry chooses to focus only people in the business realm. The new model is replaced with a bigger screen so that customers can easily view emails, messages, and even work with the spreadsheet. A physical touchscreen keyboard panel attached at the bottom is said to reduce the typing time and typos by 74%. Other specs include a 2.2 GHz quad-core processor and 3GB of RAM. With these new transformations, the cost only starts at $599 which is still a lot cheaper than Samsung galaxy and iPhone.

By using the focus strategy, I think Blackberry is heading towards the right direction. Even though its market might be narrower, it will get a high degree of customer loyalty. Knowing this, Blackberry will then be able to charge its loyal customers with a higher price in the future. It’s quite interesting to see concepts learned in class being used in real world situation.