BlackBerry’s head of global sales Carl Wiese revealed that the troubled consumer electronics manufacturer is continuing to focus on enterprise software in the near future and will possibly completely abandon its declining smartphone business. In an interview with The Register linked below, Wiese explained that BlackBerry recently did quite well in the enterprise software department after it purchased Good Technology in 2015 for a reported fee of $425 million. The focus on software was stressed even back then and it seems like that approach is working for BlackBerry who still has a $2.6 billion in cash reserves to operate with.
Wiese explained that all of the debt that BlackBerry is currently operating with is “friendly debt” owned by the Fairfax Financial consortium. He continued by revealing that BlackBerry’s short-term goal is merging its services with the recently acquired Good Technology by integrating Good’s proprietary network into its own one and using Good for software development. The central piece of the plan to focus on enterprise software development will be the existing Good Dynamics software development kit (SDK) which already powers some rather high-profile names like Microsoft Dynamics. The plan is to gradually ennoble this offering with other BlackBerry’s acquisitions such as the WatchDox secure document system and AtHoc crisis management solution in order to offer comprehensive and customizable service packages to businesses of all sizes.
And while Wiese hasn’t specifically said that BlackBerry will definitely be dropping its hardware business in the near future, that was the general vibe he gave away during the interview. One person who certainly isn’t surprised by these developments is Daniel Chan, a respected analyst working for TD Securities who claimed that BlackBerry is preparing to soon exit hardware business in general. It remains to be seen whether that scenario will actually play out as BlackBerry recently announced that any future phones will be determined by the success of its latest Priv flagship and if recent reports are to be believed, the sales of that device have been relatively solid. Furthermore, BlackBerry has earned $548 million in global sales in Q3 of 2015 so it seems like the company is finally going in the right direction after its mobile business imploded several years ago. Now, time will tell whether or not that direction will also include smartphones.