Comment by brk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brk | Hacker News Reader

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Maybe... What is their sales trend though? I haven't bothered to look into myself, but based on what we see and hear, my assumption would be that BB sales are going down.

There are still lots of legacy BB shops, and those shops are still hiring new employees, replacing lost or outdated phones and so forth. BB may be selling 6 million units per quarter, but if they are losing marketshare rapidly (as they appear to be), those sales most likely aren't worth much. Additionally, if they are staffed up for 20 million units a month (eg: tons of office space, lots of personnel), then 6 million is not enough to sustain the company. We've already seen signs of this in the form of massive layoffs.

Also, this isn't a market where you can stagnate, so they won't be around indefinitely unless they have the R&D team to keep pace with new trends, plus create a couple of innovations.

That's exactly the right question to ask. When they were selling 15M phones a year or two ago, selling 5-6M M phones today is a disaster, especially when the trend continues downward after releasing the BB10 which was supposed to "save" BlackBerry. Then add the fact that they had to take a big loss on unsold BB10 inventory, and the picture is pretty bleak.

They can probably stick around for a long time as a niche player, but that's not going to provide the kind of big returns that the investors expect.

"Bad deal for investors" is something I can't disagree with. I sure wouldn't put any money in them.

This doesn't mean that they're going to go out of business and everyone needs to race to abandon ship, though.

No, but the outlook is uncertain. There's a history of solid mobile platforms being abandoned much more quickly than most would expect: Symbian, WM6, Palm, Sidekick (including the spectacular Microsoft data deletion screwup), so to not make contingency / transition plans now when BlackBerry is officially up for sale would be irresponsible.

They can let employees go, like they have. Office space is somewhat harder to deal with, but it can be sublet without tremendous loss.

Compare to, say, GM a generation ago. They had massive factories that needed maintenance whether being used or not, plus union contracts that kept unemployed workers in a 'job bank' that paid 80-90% of wages, on the (incorrect) assumption that any job loss would be temporary.

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