Canadian smartphone maker, BlackBerry has decided to stop making mobile phones as it is witnessing a decline in sales for some years.
BlackBerry's CEO John Chen in a statement said, "The company plans to end all internal hardware development and will outsource that function to partners. This allows us to reduce capital requirements and enhance return on invested capital."
"BlackBerry will focus on providing state-of-the-art security and device software," Chen added.
The decision of BlackBerry was long expected as the company is seeing a decline of mobile phone business for quite some time, despite adopting several tactics. Once known for its keypad based phones, the company jumped to full touch screen based devices and had even adopted Android OS, over its BlackBerry OS.
But despite that it reportedly sold around 4 lakh devices in the recent quarter against 5 lakh devices in the previous quarter.
Meanwhile, BlackBerry is trying to position it as a software company. It has now announced a new joint venture, BB Merah Putih, to licence software and services for the production of devices targeting Indonesia. The venture is led by Tiphone Mobile Indonesia, which is said to have the largest distribution network in Indonesia. As per BlackBerry, it will have no role in BB Merah Putih other than licensing.
"Under the new device-software licensing agreement, BB Merah Putih will have full access to the BlackBerry experience, which includes the trusted BlackBerry for Android secure software and the Hub unified communications software, for the production of new devices in Indonesia," Ralph Pini, Chief Operating Officer and General Manager, Mobility Solutions, at BlackBerry, said in a blog post.
No comments:
Post a Comment