BlackBerry CEO John Chen has admitted that the company may have to slash or even completely halt smartphone production if its situation doesn’t change.
After a run of bad fortune, puzzling strategy and terrible sales that has stretched on for over two years, BlackBerry may finally be forced to throw in the towel and stop producing smartphones.
BlackBerry’s quarterly revenue recently fell to just £263 million, down 31 percent compared with last year’s figures, and Chen acknowledged that if the current state doesn’t improve, a change of strategy will be needed.
The company has already started turning its focus back to professional users after a massive decline in market share, following failed attempts at winning back the consumer market. Chen has also outsourced manufacturing to a number of Taiwanese companies in an bid to cut costs.
If things don’t improve soon, Chen revealed that BlackBerry may cut out low-end devices and reduce the overall number of phones it produces. But in a worst case scenario, BB may have to slash hardware entirely and focus on enterprise software solutions instead.
However, despite the doom and gloom, BlackBerry is set to launch three new phones in 2015 – a launch which we presume will still happen in the coming month or so. Leaks so far suggest that the new hardware, including a successor to last year’s bizarre square-shaped Passport phone, are nearing completion. However, we don’t know if BlackBerry has started mass production already, so if these phones do emerge it could be in limited quantities.
If that is the case, perhaps BlackBerry’s last smartphones will end up being seriously hot property.
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