BlackBerry’s Managing Director in India, Sunil Lalwani, gave an interesting interview to DNA India recently on Thursay. In this interview, he confirmed that BlackBerry is not exiting the device space but rather is focusing on the Z30 and Q10 as top devices and Z10 and Q5 as mid market devices. However, he also went on to say that BlackBerry 7 devices will be supported only until December 2015 though he did not explain what that means. He says they will then discontinue selling older BlackBerry devices and provide exchange and upgrade offers to BlackBerry 10.
That said, however, BlackBerry clarified against it, and it turns out that no such determination has been made.
Here was the interview:
It’s been a difficult one year, but you only emerge stronger and learn what is your core strength based on which customer segments are still loyal to you. It’s not that we are not profitable anymore, but have taken several write-offs resulting in a hit on our books in the last one year. This was due to several reasons.
When we launched BB 10, it was a new platform built ground up to upgrade a decade old BB platform. The inherent new features of BB10 had to be clearly articulated to end-users, which wasn’t done well, leading to issues like inventory build-up of the Z10 but after cutting the price, sales have picked up again. In the last quarter, 60% of our revenue came from services and software – they generate higher margins. This is why, this year and beyond, services and software will be predominant focus for BlackBerry, and devices will be a pull through. We believe this strategy will be key to our turnaround and profitability in 2014, and we are extremely bullish about the future of BlackBerry.
And here’s what BlackBerry has to say:
BlackBerry intends to support the BlackBerry operating system indefinitely. Any comments to the contrary are not correct.
Whilst this is good news for BlackBerry legacy device users, it boils down again to the question of what is going on? It displayed fragmentation and that within BlackBerry there seemed to be confusion amongst themselves.
