CEO John Chen opened up about his
mission at BlackBerry in an interview for the Financial Times. He
believes he has a "50:50" chance to turn around the
struggling company. The CEO aims to make BlackBerry's cash-flow
positive by the end of its current fiscal year and return to profit
before the end of March 2016. He also hopes that BlackBerry will
eventually become a dominant market player again.
Mr. Chen believes the company has to
act now, and refocus on its "heritage and roots - delivering
enterprise-grade, end-to-end mobile solutions." He briefly
compared his task at BlackBerry with his successful turnaround of
Sybase, which went from stagnation to being acquired by Germany's SAP
in 13 years. That's quite the chunk of time, but under his helm, the
company did manage to achieve 55 consecutive quarters of
profitability and a market capitalization of $5.8 billion, up from a
low of $362 million. Obviously, the situation is more difficult with
BlackBerry. Chen said "it's a bit more challenging to engineer
change" in the Canadian company, without elaborating further.
John Chen stated that "it's
important to stay positive" and commented that BlackBerry's
enterprise customers tend to stay longer, although they are harder to
win. Recently Chen scoffed at enterprise competitor Good Technology
and US wireless carrier T-Mobile for their BlackBerry-undermining
promotions which gave customers who want to ditch the company's
services and phones an advantage.
Although BlackBerry fans are as
outspoken as the company's CEO, T-Mobile's 94% trade-in rate of
BlackBerry phones goes to show that the company's former management
couldn't deliver an attractive enough portfolio of consumer products.
That's, once again, something Chen's BlackBerry is starting to look
after. It has already begun offering phones that directly address
customer feedback and market opportunities. The BB Z3 is an offering
for the emerging markets, which BlackBerry used to lack, while the Q20
brings back the trackpad
and buttons “toolbelt” that BB fans missed from previous
QWERTY-handsets. More powerful and compelling phones, including one
with a 64-bit octa-core CPU, are planned for the non-distant future
as well.
source: Financial
Times
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