To clear up rumors about company struggles, Blackberry interim chief executive officer John Chen re-affirmed the company is in good standing the Associated Press reported Monday.
"BlackBerry is very much alive, thank you," Chen said in the letter to customers the AP reported. (The company is aware that) BlackBerry is not for everyone.
""They are being targeted pretty heavily. Their customers are up for grabs. It's a much smaller business. This is the niche player. You can build phones for those people in that niche. You can have a decent little business," Colin Gillis, an analyst at BGC told the AP. "Enterprise customers who like keyboards. There's not really a good keyboard device out there. Some people like keyboards. I personally don't love typing on glass."
Canadian financial services company Fairfax Holdings was recently close to a deal to privatize the mobile carrier, but ended up deciding to fork out about $1 billion for the company's revival since chief executive officer Thorsten Heins was no longer chief executive officer The Los Angeles Times reported.
Blackberry also made changes at the top with three executives in Kristian Tear, chief marketing officer Frank Boulben, and chief financial officer Brian Bidulka. James Yersh will take over for Bidulka at the chief financial position. Bidulka will also remain with the company at a special advisor to the chief executive officer.
Last year, Blackberry was out $646 million when its revenue decreased 40 percent to $11 billion The Wall Street Journal reported. The company lost four million subscribers and suffered another decrease of $84 million in the fiscal quarter that ended June 1 in 2013.
Blackberry made a smaller amount of cuts over the summer from its sales, and research, and development departments. This comes just a year after the company let go 5,000 people from 12,700.
Two years ago, over 17,000 employees worked at the company based in Waterloo, Ontorio Canada. Blackberry also had control of 14 percent of the smartphone business. This has since dropped to less than three percent.
