Chen announces BlackBerry’s turnaround is complete

John Chen will stay as BlackBerry’s chief executive through at least November 2023, the company announced yesterday.


BlackBerry credits Chen with pausing and reversing what once appeared to be doomed prospects by transferring the company’s struggling mobile hardware business and shifting its primary focus to “cybersecurity investments and embedded software that today are delivering the vast majority of the company’s revenue and growth.”


Chen himself apparently feels that BlackBerry has completed its turnaround and successfully pulled itself out of the dire circumstances it faced when he came on 5 years ago in 2013. The company has been beating financial expectations in recent quarters and 2018 forecasts looks promising.

“I would not call us in a turnaround mode anymore,” Chen told Bloomberg TV in January. “We make money, we generate growth in the right areas.” Those areas are primarily cybersecurity and enterprise. We’re very good in the cybersecurity, enterprise for regulated industries in particular like the banks and the governments and the healthcare".

“The next leg of our growth is with auto,” Chen said in that interview, which coincided with news of a deal between BlackBerry and Baidu to jointly develop self-driving vehicle technology utilizing BlackBerry’s QNX platform.

QNX will serve as “the foundation for Baidu’s Apollo autonomous driving open platform.” Also in January, BlackBerry announced Jarvis, a cloud-based cybersecurity product that can scan automobile code for vulnerabilities.

Earlier this month, BlackBerry sued Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp over allegedly infringing upon its messaging patents.

https://techoptin.com/news/blackberry-to-keep-john-chen-as-ceo-through-2023/