BlackBerry Announces $1B loss, 4500 layoffs and shifts away from consumer market | Hacker News Reader

BlackBerry Announces $1B loss, 4500 layoffs and shifts away from consumer market

venturebeat.com

32 pointsBrajeshwar10 comments

If I understand correctly, this billion dollars is a writedown in inventory and not cash. It's for product that's only been in the channel for a few months. Good product like the Z10.

Why? This lowers the price of the corporation so it can be taken private. They are making BlackBerry as affordable as they can, as quickly as they can.

I have a Q10 and I love it. I had a Z10 and I wish I still had it. Great smartphones with the best OS I've ever used. And just recently they announced the "flagship" Z30 to get users excited: http://www.techcentral.co.za/meet-blackberrys-new-flagship-t...

BlackBerry will be around for a long time, but they will be leaner, wiser and with a genuinely great product line for the future.

The strategy of chasing price conscious consumers seems to have failed. Fairly recently, Blackberry was voted "coolest youth brand" in South Africa, while they flooded the market with poorly built, cheap Curves (I had a Curve, which took 10 minutes to boot). As bandwidth costs have come down, unlimited BIS has become less important. And people realise that having to give their phones in for fixing every six months is a poor deal.

I sometimes see the argument that a product being popular in the developing world is a ray of hope but Nokia's decline (despite dominating feature phone market with quality phones), along with Blackberry's decline is a signal that third world consumers are not a long-term cash cow.

If you get a product popular on all the BRICS you can use it as cash cow...

Nokia in particular suicided themselves, when they stopped manufacturing Symbian phones they still had 60% of new phones sold in Brazil for example... Since they stopped Symbian and took a while to launch a WP phone, and the WP phones were much more expensive than their Symbian ones, they went from 60% to a negligible amount purely because they did not deliver anything to sell...

Now their market is taken over mostly by chinese companies.

One reason why Blackberry holds leadership positions in a few markets is they work directly with the government to ensure their products don't get hit by the same import tariffs their competitors do, giving them a very significant price advantage - for example, they started assembling BB's in Argentina a while back for this reason (http://investba.com/2011/07/research-in-motion-blackberry-ar...).

In the last few years Apple has started to do the same: http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/02/24/apple_begins_selli...)

Isn't the reason for this because Christina Kirchner's son owns one of the fab plants? And the tarrifs they impose on imports is prohibitive?

A few questions come to mind: How much cash do they have in reserves? Can they survive till q1 2015 when they say costs will be slashed in half? Does the enterprise market still care for them enough? Could they survive as a platform and not a hardware maker (or which side of coin is more profitable for them?)

1) about 2.6 billion

2) probably.

3) some segments do.

If they get small enough I suspect they'll be able to sustain operations. It will probably become quite a lucrative consulting niche.

But how small of a consulting biz? would this be something IBM then acquires?

I'm not sure about for them - I meant for third parties :) Pretty much any level of adoption in the enterprise will necessitate development of LOB apps. Some of those enterprises will do it in-house, but others will not. With BB10 being scarce in the consumer world, there will not be a ton of talent with experience in building for it.

I worked once for a company that made BlackBerry apps, and they were made mostly for companies crazy about secrecy and security, with the biggest clients being big pharma.

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