“If I cannot make money on handsets, I will not be in the handset business,” explained Chen, who added that the window for deciding whether BlackBerry handsets could be profitable was small.
That said, this shouldn’t send the BlackBerry diehards into too much of a panic because Chen thinks that BlackBerry can make money selling phones as long as it ships at least 10 million per year. While this doesn’t sound like much, remember that the company only sold 3.4 million smartphones to end customers over the past quarter and most of those sales were of phones running the legacy BlackBerry 7 software. What’s more, BlackBerry only recognized revenue from 1.3 million handsets in Q4 2014 so the company can’t afford to see its smartphone sales go much lower if it hopes to eke out a profit on them.
In a followup to the Reuters story posted on BlackBerry’s website, Chen also said his remarks were “taken out of context” and that he has “no intention of selling off or abandoning this business any time soon.” Instead, Chen said the company is simply focussing on how to make this business profitable and that his goal is to keep making BlackBerry handsets.
Chen also told Reuters that while he does have a long-term strategy in place, he can’t be completely wedded to it because the situation he inherited at BlackBerry is so dire.
“You have to live short term,” he said. “Maybe the prior management had the luxury to bet the world would come to it. I don’t have the luxury at all. I’m losing money and burning cash.”
BONUS:
Not even BlackBerry can escape the Heartbleed bug
Here’s how you know that Heartbleed is a serious and widespread problem: Even BlackBerry is scrambling to push out patches for it. Although BlackBerry prides itself with being the world’s leader in mobile security, Reuters reports that it was caught flat-footed by the Heartbleed bug just like everyone else and is now planning “to release security updates for messaging software for Android and iOS devices by Friday to address vulnerabilities in programs” exposed by the massive new security flaw.
Heartbleed is a major flaw in OpenSSL, the security protocol used to encrypt web traffic, that could potentially allow hackers to swipe any data that users send over the web. News about the bug sent shockwaves throughout the tech industry last week as companies are now quickly trying to patch security holes on their own websites to keep their users’ data safe.
The good news for BlackBerry users is that the company says that most of its products are unaffected by Heartbleed and are perfectly safe to use. The bad news is that one of the products that is affected is its cross-platform version of BBM, its hugely popular mobile messaging app that has an estimated 85 million monthly active users.
Even so, BlackBerry senior vice president Scott Totzke tells Reuters that “the level of risk here is extremely small” and that exploiting Heartbleed on BBM would take a “very complex attack that has to be timed in a very small window.”
If you still don’t feel comfortable using BBM until the security hole is patched, you’ll only have to wait until the end of the week until it’s safe again after BlackBerry releases its BBM patch.
