Seems to be the most popular news headline for BlackBerry in the last few years, the company cutting jobs. The Waterloo smartphone manufacturer has had trouble in the last 5 or so years, with the uprising of iOS and Android. RIM, now BlackBerry, has had trouble adapting to the new mobile market, thanks to players like Google and Apple doing so well. And it’s pretty much cost them their livelihood.
BlackBerry’s CEO, John Chen has been working to turn around the company, and hasn’t done a terrible job either, actually. Part of that turn around appears to be BlackBerry smartphones running on Android. As we’ve seen at least two smartphones from BlackBerry leak out with Android on top. Chen has also made profits, somehow, for the company by cutting costs. Back in May, the company also cut a number of jobs, and it looks another round of cuts is coming. The last head count for BlackBerry was back in September 2014 when it had roughly 7,000 employees. Sad to say, the number is likely much lower now.
The company has not disclosed how many jobs they are planning to cut in this round of job cuts, but it likely won’t be small. This is all part of John Chen’s turn around plan for the company. By tightening costs for the company, and hoping to somehow make a profit. BlackBerry is still very popular in Africa and Asia. They are also very popular with enterprise customers, due to the enterprise security that BlackBerry provides. Typically enterprise customers do not change up phones – let alone platforms – that often.
Kara Yi, a spokeswoman for BlackBerry stated in an email to Bloomberg this week, “As BlackBerry moves into the next stage of its turnaround, we remain focused on driving efficiencies across our global workforce. As a result, some employees have been impacted.”
So BlackBerry is still focused on the future, in terms of their company. Although their future doesn’t look as bright as it once did, unfortunately for BlackBerry. Fingers crossed that these Android-powered BlackBerries can help out the company in some sort of way. There are still plenty that would love to have a physical keyboard device running Android. And BlackBerry could offer that.