Blackberry, a company had $20 billion in revenue and controlled half of the smartphone market, now has less than one percent in the cellphone market. Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis started this business and they engineered a pioneering pocket email device which made blackberry popular than ever among CEOs and presidents. However, after Apple and Google entered into the market, everything changed.
I made a SWOT analysis for Blackberry.
STRENGTH
1.Extremely secure telephones at that time.
2.Focuses on specific consumer groups—governments and corporates.
WEAKNESS
1.Failure in marketing because of poor promoting endeavors.
2.Highly dependent on government and corporate contracts. (main consumers)
3.Absence in the tablet market. BlackBerry’s Playbook tablet was a failure move.
OPPORTUNITIES
1.Growth of tablet and cellphone markets.
THREAT
1.Rapid technology changes, high investment in research and development to ensure survival.
2.Fierce competition, mainly from iOS and Android devices.
3.Involvement in legal issue.
losing the signal can be said as one of the key reasons of why blackberry fell. It did not see the coming threats from Apple and failed to adjust its products to fit the environment. It dismissed the need to do anything about the situation in the short term. Unlike Blackberry, Google realized that the world would change so it scrapped its keyboard plans. Blackberry aims at efficiency, security and all the other things that matters for businessmen. However, market demand tends to prefer cellphones with fun and beautiful design which are completely different from Blackberry’s core idea. Also, people now are used to touchscreen phones instead of keyboard phones. Blackberry would be eliminated from the competitive market since it failed to do any technological improvements or changes.
This story tells us the importance of knowing the external influences on business (threat and opportunity. Businesses need this information to make decisions about how to change its product or services to survive in the market. Blackberry failed because of losing the signal.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/behind-the-downfall-at-blackberry/?ref=topics