BlackBerry was once at the very top of the food chain the mobile industry. The company’s devices were quite expensive, but were also in high-demand due to branding and their sheer quality. Well, things have changed over the years, as BlackBerry failed to adapt to the ever-growing mobile industry. The company is not doing all that great at the moment, they haven’t been able to sell many smartphones over the last couple of years, and their BB10 OS didn’t help the cause. BlackBerry has actually opted to release their first Android-powered smartphone, the Priv, last October, and even though this smartphone was selling really well in the beginning, it seems like things are not looking all that great for the company.
According to Seeking Alpha’s last post, BlackBerry is pretty much doomed, well, at least their smartphones are. Robert Lehar decided to elaborate on his thought in a column, and as a part of it, he shared some BlackBerry sales numbers. The company was actually able to sell around 2 million handsets in the middle of 2014, and their sales fell to just 600,000 last quarter, which is certainly not a good sign. Mr. Lehar was quite harsh in his column, and has referred to the BlackBerry Priv as an ‘overpriced hybrid’, even though there are quite a few people out there that enjoy using this phone. The device might be more expensive than most people think it should, but this is a BlackBerry after all, we’re used to such pricing from the Canada-based company.
That being said, the column you’ll find by clicking on the source link might be harsh, but there are some good points in there, especially considering BlackBerry sales and general financial situation. The lack of revenues certainly affects research and development, and it will be interesting to see how long will BlackBerry keep their hardware business going. The company is actually expected to release two Android-powered devices in the coming months, and one of them is expected to launch in September (a mid-range one). Either way, we’ll see what happens, stay tuned, we’ll report back soon.