An influential analyst has insisted that with the way things are going at BlackBerry right now, the company will not survive another year.
BlackBerry has had a couple of semi-successes over recent months and has also made it pretty clear that it won’t be going down without a fight. What’s more, the launch of the frankly bizarre BlackBerry Passport proved that they’re in no way afraid to push boundaries and ignore convention, if it means they may be onto a hit.
Sadly though, nothing has been enough to restore the brand to its former glory and there are those in the industry that continue to believe BB’s days are numbered. One of which being Douglass McIntyre, who in a recent 24/7 Wall St. post has insisted that this could be the very last year BlackBerry sees the end of.
“BlackBerry is about to run out of its nine lives,” he wrote.
“As recently as 2008, BlackBerry, then operating as Research In Motion, had 19.5% of the global smartphone market. However, following Apple’s introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and Google’s release of the Android mobile operating system in 2008, that figure fell to less than 1% by late 2013.”
He went on to suggest that even taking into account recent successes, the damage inflicted by the Q10 and Z10 Smartphones was already too severe to come back from.
“Despite the fanfare surrounding the release of two new phones last year, sales of the Z10 and Q10 were abysmal. At the end of last year, BlackBerry outsourced its hardware to Foxconn to focus on its software offerings,”
“The company has positioned its QNX platform as the most secure operating system for mobile communication, and it is now a leading OS in the auto and health care industries. While these are attractive businesses for potential buyers, they are inadequate on their own to make the company viable,”
“BlackBerry cannot survive on its own,” he concluded.