Thursday, April 10, 2014

BlackBerry may stop making smartphones

BlackBerry Ltd. (BBRY:US)’s John Chen is giving himself two years to overhaul the smartphone maker and offset declining handset demand with sales of software that connects computers with all manner of machines, from cars to heart monitors.

Chen, who took over as chief executive officer (BBRY:US) in November, is stepping up BlackBerry’s reliance on business customers instead of the smartphones that made the company famous. In the worst-case scenario in which he misses his goal of generating cash flow by this fiscal year, Chen said he’ll have six to eight quarters to replace declining hardware sales (BBRY:US) with higher-margin software revenue.

“I don’t have a plan to get rid of handsets, I have a plan to not be dependent on handsets,” Chen said yesterday in an interview at Bloomberg’s headquarters in New York. “All I need to do is replace the handset revenue, and this company will be very different.”


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