Load the Game

Transformed BlackBerry is now planning to grow

• Egon Kilin
• August 6th, 2014

BlackBerry has been changing for a while now, as the company was attempting to regain its place as world leader on the mobile market. As many other companies struggled to reach the top spot, BB met decline, which led to thousands of layoffs and the loss of reliability. Recently, the company managed to get a hold of itself and started a complete transformation project, continued with purchasing Secusmart, a German mobile security company. BB’s transformation is almost complete now, as a report suggests, claiming the company is now looking to grow even more, meaning future layoffs will be out of discussion.

If layoffs were a problem until now, they won’t be in the future, because BlackBerry is also planning to rehire, CEO John Chen stated in the report. The company plans to restaff areas like product development, sales and customer service, areas that were very affected during the transformation. Blackberry focused on clients like corporate and government members, strengthening the security and the mobile-device management, action that led to layoffs up to 40% of their workforce. Unfortunately for BB, all their glorious comeback attempts turned out to be nothing but big failures. The company planned a big comeback with its BlackBerry 10 OS, but it didn’t work as well as they planned and the popularity kept on dropping as other companies gained more fans.

With a new CEO, namely MR. Chen known and respected for its successful turnarounds, taking the lead, BlackBerry’s future did no longer sound so concerning. The company started developing new devices almost immediately, and introduces both low-end and high-end devices. The low-cost smartphones were only prepping the market for the two higher-end BlackBerry Classic and the BlackBerry Passport. Both devices were considered a great improvement, but the question whether BlackBerry is indeed ready to take on Apple or Samsung, both fearless rivals, still remained, and it will probably continue to exist until BB regains the good reputation it had once.

Mr. Chen is very optimistic regarding the company’s future, restaffing is only one on the big steps BB has to make. Along with purchasing Secusmart and improving the mobile security, which is probably one of the most important features of a respected smartphone lately, BlackBerry also partnered with Foxconn. As two steps forwards imply one step backwards, BlackBerry had to somehow reduce manufacturing costs and focus on more important issues. Doing so, Mr.Chen chose to sell real-estate holding and other assets. Then, BlackBerry partner with the hand-sets supplier (Foxconn) and bought the mobile security company they worked with for a long time. Perhaps a new leader was everything BlackBerry needed, and now that the company promises to show off with their newest devices, all geared-up with the best voice call security system, it may have a chance.