BlackBerry is no longer the giant it once was. The company’s handsets don’t even account for one percent of the global smartphone market and yet it continues to sell its devices. It has been well over a year since BlackBerry launched a flagship handset and all this time there have been rumors about the future of its phone business. It’s now being rumored that BlackBerry may announce the closure of its phone business on September 28th.
It absolutely merits mentioning here that there has been no indication from the company yet that something of this sort is going to happen. Just a couple of days ago it started selling the BlackBerry Priv in South Korea after being away from that market for three straight years, so take this with a grain of salt.
It’s claimed that 65 percent of BlackBerry’s research and development expenses are sucked up by the ailing phone business that’s not doing much to generate revenue for the company. BlackBerry has been trying to turn itself around and we’ve seen it greatly shift focus towards software in the last few years leading many to believe that it may ultimately ditch phones.
The company has already ceased production of the BlackBerry Classic while previous reports suggest that BB told carrier partners that it will no longer be making BB OS10 powered devices. BB did release a mid-range Android handset recently and dubbed it as the “world’s most secure Android smartphone,” but many retailers are now selling it at a discount even though it hasn’t been long since the DTEK50 came out.
Nevertheless, unless there’s concrete evidence to support that what many have felt for so long is finally happening, we will have to assume that BlackBerry has every intention of competing in the global smartphone market, even if that seems impossible for it now.
BlackBerry is due to announce its quarterly earnings on September 28th so we will have more clarity when it talks about its future after revealing the numbers.
Filed in . Read more about BlackBerry.