More Bad News As BlackBerry Looks For Success
BlackBerry’s hardware has struggled over the past year. The estimates of 850,000 handset sales for its Q4 2015 fell short, with CEO John Chen reporting total unit sales of around 600,000 units.
Much of that drop in sales comes down to its latest handset, the BlackBerry Priv. After soldiering on with the in-house BB10 operating system, 2015′s Priv was BlackBerry’s first handset to use Android. It was hoped that pairing BlackBerry’s brand name and focus on security with the most popular mobile operating system on the planet would lead to a winning combination. That doesn’t appear to be the case.
Reporting in CNet, Roger Cheng notes the comments of an AT&T Executive: “The BlackBerry Priv is really struggling,” the high-level executive, who asked not to be named, said last week. “We’ve seen more returns than we would like.”
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It appears that instead of bringing in new consumers to the BlackBerry ecosystem (perhaps lured by the return of a physical keyboard), AT&T saw most of the Priv sales going to existing BlackBerry owners moving up to the new platform. Many struggled with Android and returned their Privs in higher than average numbers.
BlackBerry is expected to focus on a number of cheaper Android-powered devices during the rest of 2016 with Chen confirming at least two more Android handsets are going to reach the market.
The CEO has also stated that BlackBerry needs to sell three million handsets in 2016 for the hardware division to break even. If it doesn’t, then I can’t see much point in BlackBerry remaining in the hardware game selling to a smaller and smaller pool of hardcore fans. BlackBerry has a solid suite of apps that now comfortably run on Android OS. Switching to a pure ‘software and services’ cloud-based model for 2017 and beyond is looking increasingly like the only route left open to the once all-conquering smartphone leader.
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Source: Forbes Tech
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